Product Reviews

Sapphire's Radeon 9800 SE graphics card has dropped in price to an incredible £90 (excluding VAT). It's based around the same technology as graphics giant ATI's top performer, the 9800 XT - and at this price, it sounds an absolute steal. That's why we've run the card against our current Top 50 Best Buy, MSI's FX5600-VTDR, to see which card came out on top.

We tested both cards in our 3GHz Pentium 4 test PC, which was equipped with 512MB of 400MHz DDR RAM. We used the games benchmark 3D Mark 2001 and the shoot-'em-up Unreal Tournament 2003. The Sapphire stormed through the default 3D Mark 2001 test, racking up an excellent 11870 marks. The MSI trailed 674 marks behind. The Sapphire also trounced the MSI card in Unreal Tournament, scoring 45 frames per second - five frames per second faster.

In real life, though, you won't run this card at its default settings.

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You want to turn up the picture quality settings to make your games look better. If your graphics processor isn't powerful enough, this can cause games to slow down. To see how our cards coped we turned up the two most common settings - anti-aliasing, which smoothes jagged-edged diagonal lines; and anisotropic filtering, which sharpens detail as objects fade into the background. We set anti-aliasing to a challenging 4x and anisotropic filtering to a demanding 8x.

In 3DMark 2001 the MSI card edged ever so slightly ahead, with 5839 marks to the Sapphire's 5649. This is such a small difference in score that you'll hardly notice it in real life. This conclusion is reinforced when you realise that both cards ran at 25 frames per second in Unreal.

Our final test gauged how well the cards could deal with Microsoft's new graphics standard, DirectX 9. DirectX is the program within Windows that controls how 3D graphics are created. Unreal Tournament and 3DMark 2001 use the older DirectX 8. Their results tell you how your card will cope with current games. To find out how they'll fare with future games, we used 3DMark03's Mother Nature test, which uses DirectX 9. The Sapphire scored an excellent 21 frames per second compared to MSI's relatively sluggish 8 frames.

Although it lacks the video-in connector supplied by the MSI, the Sapphire offers enough 3D power for both current and future games at only a whisker over £100 (including VAT). A bargain!