Nividia or ATI, Intel or AMD

[335th_GRAthos]

Hmmm...
Since you have Intell E8400 @ 3.0Ghz, RAM 4GB, Nvidia GTS 250 1GB, PS 850watt, MoBo MSI P45 Platinum CrossFire only, no SLI, Vista 32bit, Monitor 1920x1200
I presume you are quite adept putting together hardware together.

My recommendation would be:
Intel i7 around 2,9GHz (you can overclock them without any superior knowledge to 3,6+GHz)
6-12Gb RAM 1600 (800MHz DDR2) (helps when it comes to overclocking of the CPU)
Motherboard SLI or tripple-SLI (you may need it later)
NVidia GPU, GTX570 has 1,3Gb VRAM or higher. 1,5Gb or 2Gb RAM would be even better.
Win7-64bit (this i a must, besides it works like a dream)

I think (you need to verify) your 850W PSU should be sufficient.

I am a NVidia man, my experience since the ATI 9800xt (5yrs ago) showed me that NV cards work well. My sympaphy lies with ATI but when it comes to my wallet, it has been NV for the past 4 years.

A word on SLI, I think it words pretty well now, since the arrival of the 460 series, a second GPU gives you almost double frames therefore it is becoming a worthwhile investment.
A word of caution though, ever 14 months on average, the new GPU generation on the market has double the performance of the previous thus, depending on your wallet, you may never need to buy a second GPU for SLI configuration.


~S~