While ATI and Nvidia battle it out in the high-end sector, desperately trying to gain the performance crown, the majority of us will be closely eyeing up the mid to low range cards. Let’s get right to the point here - these cards average £140, they have all the features of the high-end cards and they can play all the latest games with rather impressive results. The vanilla 6800 and the X800XL, weighing in around the £200 mark won’t fit every ones budget. Most people simply cannot justify £200+ on a GPU. This is where these two cards shine – The serious gamer on a budget! Surely you can understand why these two cards are being bought by the dozen?

To delve in a little deeper as to why these two cards may currently be so popular, you need to realise that one of those architectural changes have been taking place again. As most of you know, AGP has been pushed to one side for a new standard – PCI-e. This means that people out there upgrading their motherboards and processors to the latest and greatest can’t use there loyal and dusty AGP graphics card any longer, therefore this typical CPU/motherboard upgrade becomes extremely pricey. A serious gaming card at £140 is going to seem so attractive at this point to many gamers, and I’m sure a lot of the sales of these cards have been because of this exact scenario.