Nvidia, anyone?

[AKA_Tenn]

ok one thing to keep in mind is that when u use SLI or crossfire, you don't get to use the memory from both cards, just the GPU's.. even if u had 3 512MB videocards in your computer crossfired, u'd still only have 512mb allocatable texture memory...

and weather u choose ATI or nvidia it makes no difference, but look at more than a few reviews and benchmarks for all cards within your price range...

unlike a bad movie, that a review said was good... videocard reviews with solid benchmarking in multiple games/appz (because its not just showing you factory specs for the card, its showing you real world performance) will give you a good idea as to how fast the videocard you want to buy is compared to others in the same price range, so long as you remember, a Pentium 4 with 256MB system ram is not fast enough for a modern videocard... if your going to buy a high end videocard, the rest of your system has to be faster than it to make full use of it. i'd say no less than a core2@3GHz with 4GB system memory (i don't know what the AMD equivalent is) for a HD5850/280GTX (just an example)