Introduction

Ask anyone, there are no doubts that the fight is on more than ever between nVidia and ATi - and not just for market dominance of the high-end and enthusiast ranges like we've experienced many times in the past but the entire range, top to bottom from low-end to top of the range. This is made blindingly obvious just by talking with distributors and retailers.

Starting from the bottom we have nVidia with their GeForce FX 5200 and ATi with their Radeon 9200 in the low-end department. Scale up to the mainstream side of things and we have nVidia with their GeForce FX 5700 and ATi with their Radeon 9600 and a whole bunch of other variants which probably would have caused Albert Einstein to generate a confused-looking face from such complexity. Then, of course, we enter the high-end and enthusiast ranges with nVidia's GeForce FX 5900 and ATi with their 9800.

Each market segment is occupied by a strong product from either company which makes life interesting for anyone involved in the industry - seller or buyer - and today our main focus is the mainstream segment, the biggest seller for both chip companies and their partners. Today we're going to put Chaintech's brand new AA5700U graphics card based on nVidia's mainstream GeForce FX 5700 Ultra chip with 128MB of DDR-II memory up against a reference version of ATi's Radeon 9600 XT.

Let's roll on and work out where your dollars will be best spent for those who have a bit of a budget to work with!

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