Sapphire Radeon 8500LE 64MB

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.

It comes close to being the cheapest card in this Labs, but it's also feature rich (with DirectX 8.1 compliance) and decently future-proof. Although it's a lot slower than the performance champions, it still packs enough grunt to churn out impressive frame rates in modern titles with good levels of detail. Its 3DMark2001 SE score at 1,024 x 768 speaks volumes: at 9,189, it only falls 5% behind the X-Micro Ti4200 – a card that's $90 more expensive and has a significantly more powerful GPU on its card.

Don't expect much in the way of added goodies because the 8500LE is about as basic as they come, and only includes a driver CD, manual and S-Video to RCA adaptor (for plugging your PC into a TV). There are no additional games or software to speak of (and in our experience, a lot of the bundled software goes to waste through not being used anyway), which is one of the reasons the price is so low.

On the whole, this is one great performer at a bargain price. This is the card to go for if you're on a strict budget but still fancy the thought of classy graphics. It also goes to show that you don't need to spend hundreds to get a top performing card.