Middle-Earth, err, I mean Middle-Ground. £70 - £130 or US$80 - $160

The middle ground is where most money is made for the graphics card companies. In this section is where you inevitably win the battle, and eventually the war, or people shun your product and go for the competitor's. Nvidia has done a fantastic job with its middle range cards, the success to this has been thrashing its previous generation card with its new breed. The old middle range card was the 6600GT, which was a favourite card of a lot of gamers, because of it’s quick pace and cheap price – a perfect balance. The new mid range 7 series is split in two: the 7600GS and the 7600GT. Let’s have a look at the 7600GS first.

The standard clock speed of the 7600GS is 400Mhz, with the memory clocked at 800Mhz. This beats the 6600GT and is also cheaper than the previous generation card, so let’s face it, it's a no-brainer. The ones to look out for are the ones with non-standard cooling. Anything with a big fan and quality ram (DDR2 or 3) means you can overclock the core speed to 7600GT speeds (560Mhz). Not bad when there's a price difference of around £/$30.

But lets now focus on the 7600GT, the price range is between £88 and £150. These cards are real quality. They are around 30% quicker than the 7600GS, and this beats the old 6 series top range card – the 6800GT. This is impressive for a mid range card, and the performance is nothing to be laughed at either. This beauty flies through most of the latest games at moderate resolution and detail settings.



Mid Range 3d Mark 06 scores:
Nvidia 6600GT scores 744 points – twice as fast as the 7300GS
Nvidia 7600GT scores 1583 points – twice as fast as the 6600GT

*WARNING: to appreciate the top end mid range cards, and the really top end cards, the rest of your system needs to be top end as well. To get quality results you need around a 3500+ Athlon 64 with 1GB of RAM, or any Core 2 Duo processot with 1GB of RAM. One last component that most people overlook when building a games machine, or just upgrading, is the Power Supply.  A quality make that’s over 400 watts is a good choice. Notice I said quality make. Stay away from the cheap rubbish, they do more harm than good!