Product Reviews

If you want to play the latest games like Half-Life 2, your PC has to be up to the job. You need a decent processor, at least 512MB RAM, a spare few gigabytes of hard disk space and - most importantly - a good graphics card.

MSI's NX6600-VTD128E is a PCI-Express graphics card. It comes equipped with 128MB of DDR3 RAM and possesses a D-Sub analogue connection for older monitors and a DVI connection for hooking up TFT monitors. It also has an S-Video output for playing games and movies through your big screen TV. Pretty ordinary so far. But the MSI has something else up its sleeve. It also

The MSI has nVidia's GeForce 6600 chipset beating at its heart. This is a slightly slower variant of the chipset used in our Best Buy graphics card, the XFX 6600GT, but MSI has souped up its card by running the graphics processing unit (GPU) and memory a little faster than nVidia's standard 6600 specification. We were keen to see how this translated into actual performance, so we set the MSI against our gruelling Doom 3 benchmark. We run our benchmark at 1,024x768 resolution - and to tax the graphics card a little more we also add 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. Even at these taxing settings, the MSI scored a respectable 33.7 frames per second - an excellent result.

If you really need a graphics card with video capturing capabilities then the MSI NX6600-VTD128E is a solid choice. But if games are a priority, we'd still plump for our Best Buy XFX GeForce 6600GT - it's 24 per cent quicker in our Doom 3 games test and costs just £22 more.