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Introduction

Today we're venturing into the world of the level-headed; the sensible enthusiast. Or, perhaps, the realist. It's a land where something around £100 will get you a new graphics card.

It's not a place where you're going to break any performance records, but does that make it boring? Hell no, there's still a lot of fun to be had. Welcome to the world of the midrange card.

ATI's Radeon X1600 GPU (Pro and XT SKUs) is where we're sticking our noses in today. We've got nine of the little pixel-pushing critters to look at, and in case you need some NVIDIA in your diet, we've thrown a GeForce 7600 GS into our testing, for comparison's sake.

We can tell you now that there's not going to be stellar differences in performance across the cards, so it's going to boil down to cooling, noise, bundle and support. With the creative minds of Sapphire, Gigabyte, HIS, ASUS, PowerColor, MSI and GeCube all presenting us with SKUs, there's promise of at least some variety in product offerings.

Enough chit chat, however... we've got some cards to test.

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