Cosmetically we feel that the Leadtek A310TD My Vivo is the most striking graphics card in this group by a fair margin. The cast aluminium heatsink covers the GPU and memory chips, and there is a gauze cover over the fan.

Technically the Leadtek is very similar to the Asus, as both cards use the FX5600 chip and both cards have a VIVO (Video In, Video Out) function. Leadtek goes for the conventional approach of one VGA port and one DVI, and it supplies a DVI adapter too.

Leadtek lost out in our performance tests by a narrow margin to the Asus card, but no doubt this is because Asus ships its card with the memory running at 600MHz whereas Leadtek chooses 550MHz. The Winfast drivers have an overclocking utility so it's likely that this performance gap could be narrowed.

The VIVO function is supplied by a blue metallic cable that is one metre long, which splits and then ends in two block connectors, one for input and one for output. Each block has a coaxial and S-Video port.

Leadtek supplies a decent software package of Ulead Cool3D SE v3.0 and Ulead VideoStudio6 SE for movie editing, as well as WinFast PVR, WinFastDVD and WinFox II. In addition you get two new games, Big Mutha Truckers and GunMetal.

The problem is that the A310TD My Vivo is so similar to the Asus card in every respect, including price, and yet the Asus is better all along the line by a small margin. We would be very happy with either graphics card but the dual DVI ports on the Asus means that it gets our recommendation over the Leadtek, although if you don't need them you can save yourself £10 with this card.