An excellent take on ATI’s new technology, complete with custom cooling and great performance

Out of the box water cooled graphics, now that's fresh.

A final price will decide the fate of this chipset. It needs to be well under $200 to compete.

Performance, software and value that almost snatches away the A-List crown.

Like the MSI X800XT-VTD256E, Sapphire's offering represents bang on average performance. But, unlike MSI, this doesn't offer the feature set to offset the higher price.

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.

Yes, it’s fast, but is that enough anymore? Poor drivers and a high price tag are enough to put us off.

A mighty dual-GPU board that makes light work of even today’s toughest DirectX 10 games.

A mighty dual-GPU board that makes light work of even today’s toughest DirectX 10 games

A competent card with older games, but it can’t handle the new generation of games.

Potentially Much faster than a X1900 XTX in games with large textures yet it costs the same. At over $100 less than Nvidia’s 7950 GX2, it’s a fine card.

With NVIDIA's new graphics chip still a couple of months away from reaching retail stores, ATI's RADEON 9700 is still the undoubted king when it comes to performance: if you want the fastest card available, then you can't go past the 9700.

Nvidia's first HDMI graphics card, complete with HDCP compatibility and decent performance.

Although this 8500LE was far from being the most spectacular benchmarker we tested, it offers an excellent performance/ price balance that's impossible to beat.

Video capture and two full games of your choice make this a Decent alternative to the 7600 GT.

One of the most striking things about Pioneer’s entry this month is the cosmetics: it’s 24hr karaoke bar meets street-racing BMW. And lots of blue LEDs! And these LED’s can get a little annoying – especially the super bright “headlight” LED’s. They shine directly ahead, and at desk height they beam straight into your eyes. There is also a large, illuminated ‘Xfinity’ etched into the front door of the case. Suffice to say this case won’t be to everyone’s taste. But otherwise, the rest of the externals are OK – the top mount houses two of the six total USB ports beneath a tidy flap, and a large power button with a good action.

If you have almost $700 to spend, the X1800 XL isn’t the way to go.

A real bargain. If you don’t need to capture video, its gaming performance makes it a great choice.