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.
Coming in at a very reasonable $330, it's not the cheapest mid-ranged card in the round-up, but it's not far off - in terms of price/performance, it put many of the more expensive cards to shame.
The GeForce FX 5600 is NVIDIA's mid-range GPU, so it can't compete with the high-end 9800 PROs and FX 5900s, but it puts in a good showing compared to the 9600. The X-Micro is also assisted by an above-average 600MHz memory speed, which helps the card especially at high resolution and with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, although the RADEON 9600 still has a slight edge in memory bandwidth.
The X-Micro's overall score of 69 is still rather impressive for a card of this nature and price.
Inclusion of a software bundle on a medium-ranged card such as this is as surprising as it is welcome, and although the games are a tad outdated, they're still very playable and add value to the package, which is already great.
Like all the other cards on test, it also includes DVI for LCD screens as well as
a video output port, and an 18-month warranty rounds out the deal.
A fantastic buy for anyone after a budget card with decent gaming grunt. If you want raw speed, you still should opt for a GeForce FX 5900 or RADEON 9800 PRO, but it'll cost you more than twice as much as the cheeky X-Micro.