Top 10 Graphics Boards for Gamers

With its speedy performance and moderate price, the Hercules 3D Prophet II Pro stays perched at the top of our chart. But this will be its last month at the top: Hercules announced that it will discontinue and stop shipping the Pro as of mid-April. Stores will continue to sell the boards until supplies run out. Sporting 64MB of DDR SDRAM, a 350-MHz RAMDAC, and an NVidia GeForce2 Pro chip, the 3D Prophet II Pro offered stellar image quality in both our Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament tests, and also posted frame-rate numbers near those of the more expensive Ultra-based boards.

We tested three new boards this month, all of which arrived with a slew of extra features: MSI's $159 MS-StarForce 818 GeForce2 MX offers a TV-out port, Matrox's Marvel G450 ETV supports dual-monitor display and includes a TV tuner, and ATI's $230 Radeon VE comes with an adapter that lets the board send video to both a monitor and a TV simultaneously.

However, less-than-desirable scores in our frame-rate and image-quality tests kept all three boards off the chart. For example, in Unreal Tournament running in 1600-by-1200-pixel resolution at a 32-bit color depth, the ATI Radeon VE posted a mere 11 frames per second, while Matrox's G450 ETV managed only 9 fps--dismal scores when compared with the Hercules 3D Prophet II Pro's 58 fps. MSI's MS-StarForce 818 could not even complete the test. Though all three boards are a bargain next to the $350 Hercules Pro card, their gaming performance just isn't convincing at higher resolutions.

At lower resolutions, the MSI card's speed and image-quality scores were more promising, nearly matching those of the other MX-based boards on the chart. Not so when it came to the Matrox Marvel G450 ETV and ATI Radeon VE--even at lower resolutions their scores put them far behind most of the competing cards we've tested.

Meanwhile, the PC World Test Center is hard at work testing cards based on NVidia's latest graphics chip set, the GeForce3, the first graphics processor with full hardware support for Microsoft's DirectX 8 application programming interface. Want to be the first gamer on your block with one of these high-powered cards? The $550 ELSA Gladiac 920 is available now at ELSA's site, while Hercules plans to start selling its 3D Prophet III in mid-May for the same price. Stay tuned for our complete results.

Beyond the Top 10

None of the recently tested boards listed below ranked high enough to secure a spot in our current Top 10. Where possible, we link to reviews of these models, either from PC World magazine's Top 10 Graphics Boardsor from a previous month's version of PCWorld.com's Top 10 Graphics Boards for Gamers.

AGP Boards

• ATI Radeon 32MB SDR and Radeon VE
  
  
• Asus AGP V7700 Pure 32
  
  
• ELSA Gladiac GeForce2 GTS
  
  
• Matrox Marvel G450 ETV and Millennium G450
  
  
• MSI MS-StarForce 816 and MS-StarForce 818 GeForce2 MX
  
  
• Videologic Vivid