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I get to play with a lot of high end graphics cards and, as much as I love these expensive beasts, I am still an absolute sucker for high value products that really pack a punch. I also realise that many of you don't like to spend ridiculous amounts of money to play games, especially when your card of choice will be out of date in six months time.

The 7300 GT was slipped out by nVidia in May as a paper launch, and even as July creeps up I've seen very little of it. It's actually quite an important card, as unlike the low end 7300 GS and LE, it is based on the same core that is used in the 7600 GT/GS. This should bring mid-range performance to the low-end price bracket.

ATI has had the X1300 out for a while now, with an equally confusing number of variants as nVidia. Nothing has really changed in this area recently, but as we haven't looked at an X1300 card before – I thought we should.

We got hold of the Sapphire X1300 256MB DDR2 card which sells for £52.82 and the Inno3D GeForce 7300 GT 256MB DDR3 which is priced at £67.99 including VAT.

There are three main varieties of X1300 cards out there. The HyperMemory cards use part of the system memory as the graphics frame buffer. At the top end there is the X1300 Pro which has slightly higher clock speeds than the X1300.

We are looking at the the Sapphire X1300 (standard), which is in the middle of the two. This particular version runs with lower clock speeds than the Pro, but also runs passively with no fan. It has two vertex shaders, four pixel shaders and four pixel output engines. Those are pretty low specs by anyone's standards, especially when compared next to the 7300 GT. For what it's worth, it is pixel shader version 3.0.

This particular card has a 128-Bit DDR2 memory interface, running at 250 (500MHz effective), with the core running at 450MHz. Once again, low end specifications. But what do you expect for around the £50 mark?

The bundle with this card is pretty good, with quality S-Video and Composite cables – an area Sapphire has always been good at, and the "Sapphire Select" games bundle. If you've not heard of this before, Sapphire gives you a choice of four games which you can try for an hour each – in this case Tony Hawks Underground 2, Richard Burns Rally, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. At the end of your trial, you can choose one of these as your full game, and get a 25 per cent discount on any of the others.

As this card was passive, it was a little on the warm side so we didn't venture in to any overclocking.

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