Head down to PC World and you'll see shelves and shelves of PNY graphics cards lined up, ready to beguile the Sunday shopper. You'll find the Verto FX5200 on sale there for £90, although it is available online for a much more realistic £65.

You can see the attraction of a DirectX 9 graphics card with 128MB of memory for less than £100, but the snag is that FX5200 is very much a budget graphics chip. It is a similar design to the FX5600 but it is built using the older 0.15-micron fabrication process and it doesn't have some of the colour compression features of the FX5600.

You can see the result of these changes in our test results. The Verto FX5200 is slow at a resolution of 1,024 x 768 with the quality settings turned off and then it slows dramatically as the features are enabled. Although this card can theoretically run these settings, the frame rate is far too slow, and you wouldn't be able to play games properly.

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PNY has packaged the card in a fairly basic way. It has an active heatsink and you get a couple of TV-Out cables in the box, and as it has no DVI output, naturally there is no DVI adapter. PNY includes a basic games package of Elder Scrolls III Morrowind, Tribunal and TES Construction kit.

We have no problem with any of that, but the FX5200 is simply too slow to be of any interest to real gamers. Granted the Verto FX5200 is a cheap card, but the Connect3D Radeon 9600 has twice the performance for only a little extra cost.