nVidia GeForce 256

A little over a year has passed since releasing the GeForce 6800, and right on cue, NVIDIA’s new chip is hitting town in the form of the GeForce 7800 GTX.

An old PC is like putty in your hands. Tim Dean looks at how you can shape it into a new system with a few easy upgrades.

Offering bags of gaming power for an attractive price, the GeForce 8600 series is an enticing prospect.

Breathe some life into your old PC in time for a Vista upgrade with these budget AGP video cards.

NVIDIA has released a ForceWare driver that allows GeForce 6600 cards to be run in SLI mode.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

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.

We put every current model from ATI and NVIDIA through its paces to find out which offers the best performance and value.

Looking to build your dream machine? We explore the latest components on the market, and give you advice on which ones to hunt down, along with the general price you can expect to pay for each major component.

Components bring Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3 and Call of Duty 4 to laptops.

Seriously powerful mobile gaming grunt with all the bling, from Dell. Yep, Dell.

The Quadro FX3000 is based on the same NV35 core that powers the latest GeForce FX 5900 cards, but with a few new additions to cater to the professional market. Compared to the older Quadro FX2000, which was based on the NV30, or GeForce FX5800, the FX3000 has double the memory, at 256MB, as well as a 256-bit memory interface, giving double the theoretical graphics bandwidth, hitting just over 27GB/s. It also supports other features from the NV35, including a 128-bit floating-point precision graphics pipeline, 128-bit colour, 12-bit sub-pixel accuracy, 16x full-scene anti-aliasing, 3D volumetric textures, and of course support for all the latest OpenGL, DirectX and NVIDIA’s own Cg graphics language versions.

GeForce 8800 can speed up brute force attacks by a factor of 25.

It’s NVIDIA’s flagship, but still trails behind the top ATI cards.

Playable frame rates at 1600 x 1200 and the latest features for under $460. A great-value choice.

Silent, powerful and cheap: the ideal card for media centres.

Lack of power and features make it one to avoid, despite the price.

Poor performer but worth a look if building a media centre.