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It was tough deciding an overall winner for this Labs. There can be no doubt - if you're looking for brute speed, then the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and RADEON 9800 PRO are the obvious choices, but we're not prepared to make a winner out of a graphics card that costs close to $1,000. For this reason, we've chosen the card we believe delivers the best balance of performance and price - which turns out to be the GeForce FX 5600.

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For our second runner-up this month, we opted for a low-end card for those people looking for something affordable, but also with decent performance and features.

The Asus GeForce FX 5900 features an interesting heat sink arrangement that effectively cools the core and RAM, adding to overclocking potential.

The poorest performing GeForce FX 5600 card, AOpen's offering features average performance, most comparable to the mid-point between the 9200 and 9600 graphics adaptors.

As it's essentially based on the older RADEON 9000 with AGP 8x, don't expect any groundbreaking performance from this GPU.

One of the top performing cards in our round-up, the Sapphire was also an award contender this month. It was the fastest overall RADEON 9800 PRO card, and gave the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards a real run for their money, which is especially impressive as it's $100 cheaper than the Leadtek A350 5900 Ultra.

Bringing up the rear, the Siluro consistently scored fewer marks than all other cards in our round-up, half that of even the second-lowest scoring card.

The Power Color R9600 was the best performing of all the RADEON 9600 PRO-based cards, and managed an almost identical overall score to the Labs Winning X-Micro GeForce 5600.

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The Hercules RADEON 9800 PRO managed some very impressive scores in 3DMark2001SE Pro at high and low resolutions, and again in 3DMark03, although it suffered a little at high resolutions.

When it comes to cooling, it's all about conductivity and surface area – and these are features the MSI FX5900 has in spades.

Missing out on an award by a hair's breadth, MSI blew the other cards away in most departments.

We received two different versions of this card during our testing, with the only difference being the housing and cooler system used.

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Blistering speed in 3D and a multitude of multimedia features makes the 3500 an excellent card for video enthusiasts and gamers alike.