Asus uses the Nvidia GeForce FX5600 chip in its V9560 card, which puts it firmly in the middle of the league for performance, when you consider the whole spectrum of graphics cards on sale today. As we have chosen to set a relatively low price ceiling for this group, the FX5600 comes out rather well in our tests, with similar performance to the Radeon 9600.

The FX5600 is based on technology from the ill-fated GeForce FX5800, which has since been replaced by the FX5900. In essence the FX5600 has two pixel pipelines, rather than the four used by the FX5800, and it also runs slower core and memory speeds.

This is a different approach to that used by Nvidia in the past, where the only difference between a Ti4200, Ti4400 and Ti4600 was the speed of the core and memory. No matter how much you overclock an FX5600 it won't begin to approach the speed and power of an FX5900. In fact Asus does include an overclocking utility with the V9560 Video Suite but it only allows a very small adjustment to the core speed and none at all to the memory speed.

Thankfully this doesn't matter, as the real strength of the Asus card is its list of features. For one thing it has two DVI-I ports, with no VGA in sight, although there's a pair of DVI-to-VGA adapters in the box if you need to use the older connection. For another, this card uses the TV-Out port for Video-In as well as Video-Out (VIVO), hence the Video Suite name.

The TV-Out cable ends in a splitter box that offers you S-Video and composite connections for input and output, so there are four ports in total. Asus also supplies plenty of software to help you make the most of your new purchase. There's Asus Digital VCR, Asus Power Director 2.5 ME, AsusDVD, Asus Medi@Show SE 2.0 and you also get a few games. They are Elder Scrolls III Morrowind, Tom Clancy Rainbow Six Rogue Spear Black Thorn and Worms Blast.

This graphics card is perfectly competent for playing modern games and also has a stack of features and software. Added to that, the low price makes it very good value.