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Introduction

NVIDIA and ATI are currently beating each other with a big stick at every discrete graphics-card sector the low side of £200.

This competition, which is reasonably neck-and-neck, is good for the consumer, pushing down prices and thereby offering significant value in the low and mid-range spaces.

Take the £150 market as an example. ATI's Radeon HD 3870 incorporates a whole host of useful features but is somewhat hamstrung by lacklustre performance. NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTs, on the other hand, provide near-GTX power at a fraction of the latter's original cost, but miss out some of the 3870's feature-set.

The green team, NVIDIA, gives its partners free rein with respect to factory-based pre-overclocking of the G92 '8800 GT 512 SKU, and that license has given the likes of Inno3D scope to engineer an iChiLL-branded model that ships with significant frequency headroom and a better-than-reference cooler.

It'll cost £189, so find out if the £40 outlay above a stock-clocked model is worth it, and, indeed, if it's a better proposition than ATI's Radeon HD 3870.

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