For a low cost card Gigabyte have still managed to throw in a few goodies, the first is the inclusion of Chris Taylors Supreme Commander - which is an RTS game. OK it may not be every ones favourite but at least you have a game to play with on your new card.

You also have a DVI to analogue adaptor which can be used on one of the Dual DVI ports - handy for those with older monitors. Plus you also have a HDTV output box for linking your card to your TV. In total the box has an S-Video out, HDTV Component (Y+Pr+Pb) and an AV out.

However you won't find loads of utilities that you would do on say the 8500GT from MSI, but the card is aimed at the mid-price gaming bracket, where punters will want a bit more performance from their investment - rather than utilities.

The one thing you will notice from the off is the lack of a fan (alarm bells will know doubt start ringing with this announcement), instead you have a giant heat sink which utilises Gigabytes Patented SilentPipe II technology, in a nutshell this relies on your cases cooling (with proper air flow) rather than its own and with proper fan placements your card should keep cool.

However we would not recommend this card for those with a small case or with little space as the heat would rise to dangerous levels.

Of course the biggest benefit of having no fan is the lack of noise but during our tests temperatures of the card rose to nearly 67oc during a heavy gaming session but our computer had been left on doing normal Windows activities for over 8 hours prior. We found the temperature to stay at 49oc to begin with and stay at around 54oc after mid to long term Windows use. But we do not have a side case fan pushing air onto the card - which we recks is needed for proper air flow.

For overclocking the lack of proper case cooling will pose a problem, but we managed to gain an extra 8fps (using Nvidia's nTune program) during our Quake 4 benchmark tests (No AA or AF) when pushing the card from the default 600Mhz GPU & 720Mhz Memory (ddr III) to 678 GPU & 742Mhz Memory, but bear in mind we only have an older P4 3.2Ghz CPU so this limited the scores slightly - however we must emphasise the need for proper cooling, a benchmark result does not use the card fully, so during a heavy gaming sesh you may find things get pretty hot without proper air flow.

On the subject of performance this is one of the reasons why we were impressed with the card, we had no idea that its performance would be on par or if not better than our 7800GTX card which bearing in mind was a top of the range card a few years ago costing £400. We managed to run games at 1280 x 1024 without AA or AF easily - and on high detail to, plus in Quake4 you can see from looking at the results that we could run the card at this res with 4 x AA and 4 x AF at 36fps.

During normal Windows use we found the graphics and icons/fonts to be sharp and we could not fault the card.

Take into consideration that you are paying around £85inc vat for this card you are getting fantastic value to performance ratio and with an added bonus of it being Dx10 you will find it can run some newer games to - though a slight drop in detail may be required.

Before we forget for those who need to know more about the specifications of the card please check out this link from Gigabyte which will hopefully answer any questions you may have.

Note the card was tested using the following spec.