These days, with most new computers being sold with processors clocked at over 800Mhz, it is no longer your CPU that holds back your computers gaming performance. These days, the major bottleneck in pc systems is the graphics card, meaning that if you want faster graphics, you want a faster graphics card.

And this is one of the good ones, for a diminuitive price. I got mine for £85, and it made an astounding difference to my P3 500 based system, I was previously using a 32Mb ATi Rage Fury card, which can handle itself in most game situations, until recently. For example, before, on Hitman: Codename 47, as soon as the action got going, my pc started to creak on a resolution of 640x480, with medium detail. I installed the new card and all of a sudden, I could play the game on 1024x768, full detail, with no slowdown. Hitman is a very demanding game graphics wise.

The card is easy to install, runs like a dream and is one of the cheapest cards you can get. It won't be able to perform at the same pace as its bigger brothers, which cost two to four times as much, but then who wants to play quake3 at 120 frames per second, when your monitor only refreshes 80 times a second? The only other negative thing is that if you do any major 2d graphics work in windows, the display isn't quite as good as the Matrox G400, but then the Matrox can't boast the Guillemots inccredible game performance.

If you don't have a geforce based card already, this is a great value buy to make your games slicker.