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Another of the RADEON 9200 cards in this round-up. Returning almost identical results to the Auriga 9200, this is an average performer, bundled with an outdated game.

In this line of work, there's really nothing quite like the all-too-occasional experience of opening a box from Apple, and unveiling the shiny wonders squirreled away inside. In fact, it's the only event that never fails to draw all and sundry AJB staff from throughout the office into the Labs to catch a glimpse of what the tech company with only 3 percent market share worldwide has managed to innovate this time.

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.

Another RADEON 9800 PRO-based card, the SmartVGA is designed for hardcore framerate gamers. In performance terms, the SmartVGA is only slightly, albeit consistently, behind the Hercules 9800 PRO.

The RX 9800 PRO is another card based on the RADEON 9800 PRO GPU that returned reasonable default resolution results, but slipped under in higher resolution synthetic benchmarking.

Gigacube is a brand we haven't seen in the Labs before, but the RADEON 9800 PRO card managed a decent showing.

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The RADEON 9600 is a funny beast. Technologically it is quite advanced, although it suffers from slightly limited memory bandwidth.

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.

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

Even though the PowerColor R9800 PRO has the default core clock and memory speeds for the RADEON 9800 PRO, it ended up being the lowest scoring 9800 PRO reviewed.

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.

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.

Auriga's offering to the 9800 PRO market returned rather inconsistent results.

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

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.

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At its very reasonable price, the Excalibur 9200 is ideal for anyone on a budget or in search of an upgrade.