Entry level AGP Cards

In the price range of Rs 2,300 to 7,000, there were eight cards, out of which seven had NVIDIA chips and one had an ATI chip. Interestingly, this lone ATI based card emerged as the winner in this category.

One year back, these were considered as entry-to-mid range cards. But according to graphics processing requirements of current games, all these cards would be just enough to let you play them. If you look at the benchmark results, none of these cards achieved a frame rate of at least 30 fps, in Doom3 and Half-Life 2, which is required for jerk-free game play. So you can still play other less graphic-intensive games well on these cards. Only the Asus V9570LE/TD FX5700 card came with some bundled games, such as Splinter Cell, Black Hawk Down and Colin McRae Rally 3, which are good games.

The Zebronics FX5500, was the only card in this category which had 256 MB of VRAM-all others had 128MB. However, the additional VRAM did not give it any performance advantage.

MSI RX9550SE-TD128 



This ATI Radeon 9550 SE GPU based card was the best performer in this category due to its exceptional scores in 3DMark05 and Half-Life 2, which were much more than the others. In Doom3, although, it was not the best performer, the results were still on the higher side. Sadly though, the card doesn't come with any games, but comes with PC-Cillin 2002 anti-virus software, along with several other useful software. Unlike, many other cards, this card doesn't let you connect two monitors to the system, as it has only one monitor output. Nonetheless, brilliant performance in all benchmarks and a price which lies between the lowest and highest extremes of the price range in this category makes this card the Editor's Choice. RQS# E30 or

SMS 130530 to 9811800601

Leadtek WinFast A340TD FX5200 



While the best part of the above mentioned MSI RX9550SE-TD128 card was its performance, the winning point of this card is its price. At Rs 2,300 it is the lowest priced card in its category, along with Zebronics FX5200. But it provides better performance and better software than the Zebronics. Although the performance of this card is not all that great, it is only slightly lower than that of the heavily priced Asus V9570LE/ TD FX5700 and MSI FX 5700LE-TD128. So it makes more sense to go for this cheaper card, than the expensive ones, whose somewhat better performance don't justify their high additional price. RQS# E31 or

SMS 130531 to 9811800601