Leadtek's 6600GT offering was a mixed bag this month. It didn't handle our DirectX 8 tests too well, but 3DMark05 saw a complete about face to see it sit in first.

We know you want to play games, so we've put 18 PCI Express graphics cards under the microscope to see who really does the job the best.

With the X800's and 6800's hogging limelight, a new battle has begun for affordable, mid-performance cards -- the 6600GT's versus the X700's -- and ASUS has stepped up to the plate with its Extreme AX700Pro.

The GeCube is a good performer -- of the standard X800 XT's it produced the highest 3DMark05 score of 1024 x 768. Most current games require full DirectX 9.0 support to be played at their best, so a good 3DMark05 score means this willhandle the newest games -- at least until DirectX 10 appears.

The Shuttle XPC is an icon of SFF design, and there are as many iterations as there are chipsets.

Unfortunately, Sparkle's 6800GT was the only card available for this Labs, and we can't compare this apples to apples with the rest of the cards in the pack. But, we couldn't let it go untested so we compared this to the rest of the field for each benchmark, which gives an indication of its advantage over the other cards through both synthetic and real-world tests.

The X700 is a relative newcomer to the PCI Express fold, and was released by ATI in response to NVIDIA's 6600 chipset. When comparing all the X700 cards that we received, we found each had its own pro's and con's, and this made them all decent propositions.