Product Reviews

Since the long-awaited release of the games Half-Life 2 and Doom 3, PCs up and down the country have been squealing for mercy. If your PC is left spluttering and jerking by the tremendous demands placed on it by these new titles, it could be time for a new graphics card.

Games such as Doom 3 are horrendously demanding on your PC - but be warned, just throwing in a new graphics card won't always solve your performance problems. If you already have a reasonable processor, like an AMD Athlon 1800+ or a Pentium 4 2GHz, and at least 512MB of RAM, but games still aren't running smoothly, then it's probably time for a graphics card upgrade. And if you don't want to turn off all the gorgeous-looking special effects to get games running smoothly, you'll definitely want a power-packed DirectX 9-compatible card like the Sparkle.

Sparkle's new graphics card is based on nVidia's 6600 GT chipset. We've already seen a card based

This 6600GT card fits the older AGP type of graphics card slot, rather than the latest PCI-Express standard, so you can even install it into quite ancient motherboards. Its only relative novelty is that it requires its own power lead to be plugged into it, so make sure you have a free power connector or a Y-splitter handy.

But what of the 3D power on offer? To sort the graphics card men from the mice we ran Doom 3 at 1,024x768 resolution, and set the detail level to the gorgeous-looking High quality setting. To stress the card even further, we added 4x anti-aliasing, which smoothes out the jagged edges in the picture. We also engaged 8x anisotropic filtering, which makes sure all the detail in the 3D world is kept crisp and pin-sharp. Even at these settings, the Sparkle managed an excellent 37.5 frames per second. That's more than quick enough to allow you to bump up the resolution to 1,280x1,024 for an even crisper image. Excellent stuff!

The Sparkle 6600GT may not be the cheapest graphics card available, but for just over £150, including vat, you won't find better 3D performance. Really avid gamers with deeper pockets should still plump for the slightly more expensive Galaxy 6800, but we'd recommend saving £50 by buying a Sparkle 6600 GT and spending the difference on a copy of Half-Life 2!