Top 10 Graphics Boards for Gamers

The ELSA Gladiac 920 remains king of the gaming boards chart for the fourth consecutive month, sporting superb image quality, blazing speed (courtesy of NVidia's GeForce3 chip set), a solid game bundle, and an excellent six-year warranty. However, continuing price cuts on impressive cards like the second-place MSI G3 Pro-VT64D (down $49 to $310) and the third-place CardExpert GeForce3 Power Pack (down $20 to $349) could knock the Gladiac off its pedestal in coming months. Keep in mind that big changes are likely once we start testing cards based on the new graphics chips from NVidia: the GeForce3 Titanium range.

NVidia announced the Titanium series of graphics chips in early October. The new chips replace the existing GeForce3 and GeForce2 Ultra chip sets, and reportedly will deliver a significant speed boost. NVidia claims that the top-end GeForce3 Ti 500 can handle up to 960 billion operations per second, giving gamers up to one and a half times the performance of the current GeForce3--and at no additional cost.

For those more interested in price than performance, the GeForce3 Ti 200 will be slower (NVidia claims it can handle 700 billion operations per second) but significantly cheaper than the Ti 500. And for casual gamers, NVidia says that the GeForce2 Ti will provide ample performance at an attractively low price. Boards equipped with the Ti series chips are scheduled to become available in stores in October. See our news story for more information.

A solitary new card makes it onto this month's chart. Squeaking into the number ten spot, the MSI MX400 Pro-VT32S features NVidia's GeForce2 MX-400 chip set, 32MB of SDRAM, S-Video-in and -out, and composite-out; it includes an S-Video cable as well. But like all the other GeForce2 MX-400-based boards on the chart, the Pro-VT32S's gaming performance suffered at high resolutions--it could not, for example, run our Unreal Tournament test when set at a resolution of 1600 by 1200 and a 32-bit color depth.

On the other hand, the MSI MX400 Pro-VT32S is adept at running games at low resolutions (such as 1024 by 768), and its $89 price is a true bargain--it matched the seventh-place Asus AGP-V7100 Pro Pure (another GeForce2 MX-400-based board) as the most inexpensive card on the chart. The card's low price and ample hardware options, combined with its very good images and good performance, make it a contender if you have casual gaming needs.

PC World Associate Editor Alexandra Krasne also contributed to this article.