The clue is in the model name. The Sapphire 9600 Pro Atlantis is a faster version of the Radeon 9600, and the results are impressive. You can play games at a standard resolution with high quality settings enabled, or you can crank up the resolution and turn off Full Scene Anti-Aliasing.

Unfortunately you can't have the best of both worlds, with high resolution and high quality too, unless you spend over £200 on a Radeon 9800 or FX5900 card, but the Radeon 9600 Pro offers a fair compromise.

Thanks to the 0.13-micron technology that ATi has used, the Sapphire only needs a small fan on the chip and the memory chips have no heatsink at all. Sapphire supplies an overclocking utility called Redline and we were able to get the memory running at a full 700MHz, which is a 100MHz increase and compares very well indeed with a standard Radeon 9600. We also raised the core speed by 100MHz using Redline, so it is clear that the Sapphire has plenty of potential.

You get more than raw speed, as Sapphire includes the usual DVI-to-VGA adapter, an S-Video-to-coaxial adapter cable, a coaxial extension cable and an S-Video extension cable. There's an acceptable software package too. In addition to the Redline utility, there's Cyberlink PowerDVD XP 4.0 and also Soldier of Fortune Double Helix.

To round it off, the price very similar to that of the Asus card. That leaves you to decide whether you want the speed of the Sapphire or the flexibility of the Vivo Asus. We are quite sure that gamers would appreciate the Sapphire while the Asus will suit nearly everyone.