Product Reviews

Playing games may not be a very constructive use of your time - but it's fun. And that's what really matters. Well, at least, it's meant to be fun. But if your graphics card isn't up to the job, it's more likely to be intensely frustrating. Thankfully, upgrading your graphics card needn't cost the earth, or at least that's what Sapphire would have you believe.

Its latest offering is built around ATI's Radeon X700 chipset, and has 128MB of DDR RAM. All fairly ordinary. The card has a digital DVI output and a D-Sub (VGA) analogue port for connecting to your PC's monitor. There's also an S-Video out, should you want to hook up your PC to your TV and play games on the big screen. There's even

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a component output for connecting the Sapphire up to really swanky TVs and projectors.

But what we're really interested in is performance. We installed the card in our test rig and loaded up our Doom 3 test. This is taxing to say the least - we run it at 1,024x768 resolution with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering enabled. These settings greatly improve picture quality, but put the graphics card under lots of strain. Anything that performs well in this test will cope well with current games.

The X700 scored a reasonable 22 frames per second (fps). At the same settings, our Best Buy card, the XFX 6600GT scores a smooth and playable 42fps. Turning off anti-aliasing gave the Sapphire a little breathing room and returned a score of 34fps. For smooth gameplay, you want an average of least 30fps.

For a card that costs just £82, the Sapphire performs very well. If you're willing to sacrifice a little graphical detail to play the latest games, it's a steal. If you want tip-top quality at a reasonable price, though, go for our Best Buy graphics card, the XFX GeForce 6600GT. It may cost £50 more, but it's nigh on twice as fast, comes with a couple of decent games and will keep slogging through the latest games long after the Sapphire has run out of breath.