Verdict: Gaming on the cheap - if you make compromises.

When dealing with £500 graphics cards such as the GeForce 8800 Ultra, it's easy to dismiss £25 as an insignificant amount of money. In the less auspicious world of budget graphics cards, though, £25 is the difference between a puny GeForce 7300 GS - which is useless in games - and a GeForce 7600 GT, a card that can play F.E.A.R. smoothly at 1,280 x 960 with 2x AA and 2x AF.

With 12 pixel processors, 12 texture processors and eight ROPs, the 7600 GT has significantly more silicon than the 7300 GS. The 7600 GT's performance, however, is limited by a 128-bit memory interface - beefier cards such as the 7900 GS boast 256-bit memory controllers - and relatively poor shader power compared with newer GPUs.

At £65, ATi's price-matched alternative for the 7600 GT is the Radeon X1650 Pro but, as our tests show, the 7600 GT comfortably outperforms this card in our test games. The £75 Radeon X1800GTO is therefore the only similarly priced ATi card offering comparable performance to that of the 7600 GT, matching the Nvidia card almost frame for frame in F.E.A.R. However, while our sample X1800GTO card was a poor overclocker, the 7600 GT proved to be much more willing. The performance gap in F.E.A.R. between the X1800GTO and the 7600 GT widened when we raised the 7600 GT's GPU from 560MHz to 620MHz, adding another 4fps to the card's minimum frame rate at 1,280 x 960 with 2x AA and 2x AF.

F.E.A.R. is over a year old, however, and the 7600 GT started to look more than a little underpowered when faced with modern games such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Need for Speed: Carbon. The 7600 GT was unable to provide a playable frame rate in either game at 1,024 x 768, which is very disappointing.

The fact is that £65 doesn't buy you enough performance to play modern games at maximum detail settings. However, if you're willing to compromise, and don't mind losing some of the eye candy in the very latest games, the 7600 GT, unlike the Radeon X1650 Pro, is at least a credible gaming card.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
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• PSUs - 14th July 2008

• OCZ Core Series 30GB - Hard disks / storage
• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB - Hard disks / storage
• Asus EAH4870 TOP - Graphics cards
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro - Sound cards
• Multiwinia - Games
• Zotac GeForce GTX 260² - Graphics cards
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 - Graphics cards