Computer gaming has evolved to a pretty exciting point for those on tight budget. This has occurred through rapid hardware developments and also through the wide range of highly enjoyable games that have been released over the past three years. Games such as Far Cry, UT2004, War Craft III, Call of Duty and NFS Underground 2 all play perfectly using todays run of the mill hardware. There are of course hundreds of other classic gaming titles that are still a lot fun to play.

After recently reviewing NVIDIAs latest bargain basement solution, the GeForce 7300GT I was shocked at how well this sub $100 US graphics card performed. Not only did it take on older gaming titles such as Far Cry with relative ease but it was also capable to playing games such as F.E.A.R with average settings enabled. Even with medium quality in game settings enabled the GeForce 7300GT was more than able to deliver playable performance at 1024x768 in F.E.A.R which is quite impressive given how visually intense this game is.

Although the F.E.A.R performance was quite impressive a resolution of 1024x768 is not exactly what most would consider high these days. Nevertheless, games such as Doom 3 and Quake 4 were very playable at 1600x1200 with the GeForce 7300GT which is most impressive. Overclocking the GeForce 7300GT allowed the frame rates to increase as much as 50% in some cases. This made the 7300GT even faster than the 7600GS in most cases which is just amazing. The 7300GT is quickly shaping up to be the best sub $100 US graphics card that I have ever seen.

Of course the primary competition for the GeForce 7300GT comes from the ATi Radeon X1300 Pro which is quite a different animal. While the Radeon X1300 Pro runs a core clock of 600MHz and a memory clock of 800MHz, the GeForce 7300GT operates with a core frequency of just 350MHz and a memory clock of 667MHz. Clearly this places the GeForce 7300GT at a huge disadvantage or at least one would think anyway. However, the huge variation in the clock frequencies is not going to have a bearing on performance due to the different pipeline configurations of each graphics card.

The Radeon X1300 Pro has a clear clock speed advantage over the GeForce 7300GT though it does only utilize 4 pipelines in total. This means despite running the core at almost twice that of the GeForce 7300GT the Radeon X1300 Pro may actually fair quite poorly in some tests as the GeForce 7300GT features a total of 8 pipelines. At the default frequencies the results could go either way depending on the gaming platform used for testing. That said most retail cards do not reflect the true performance of the GPU as they are usually either below or above the default specification.

Therefore, it is often hard for the consumer to work out which product will actually offer the best value for money. That being the case I have taken the GeForce 7300GT and pitched it against the Radeon X1300 Pro. Both cards have been tested at their default specifications as well as maximum overclocked specifications. In doing so I have taken two high quality parts, the ATi Radeon X1300 Pro is being represented by ASUS while Gigabyte are playing for the NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT on this one.