After much deliberation, I have finally come down, and away from the 400-500 dollar video cards, and narrowed it to 3 candidates. The choices were as follows: 1. X800 Pro 256MB 2. 6800GT 256MB Edit : Ahhh! Earlier I made a decision, but recently found out that I mistyped 6800GT and thought of it as 6800. So that would mean choice 1 has 12 pixelpipelines and choice 2 has 16. But the features, I think, are different. Here are my choices links. 1. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102380 2. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814150073 Thats a sapphire and XFX, which I still do not know why it has names like that when the ATI radeon 9600XT from Frys dint have a name like that. Also, the description of the 6800GT doesn't say 16 pipelines, but toms hardware benchmark page says it does. Hopefully its right. Now down to the real question, which of the 2 would be an all around smarter choice? - Mark

BTW, these won't "bottleneck" with my current settings right? Im running a AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor with 1Gig of ram. Hmmm, and the mobo Im using is that Asus K8N-E Deluxe model, well I hope people has answers. - Mark

Sapphire and XFX are the manufacturers of the cards. There's loads of others such as Asus, Gigabyte, BFG, PNY, Powercolor... Basically, they use either Nvidia or ATI chipsets to build cards. Nvidia and ATI don't generally make cards, they just make the graphics processors (Although ATI sometimes do make their own cards, but not often). The third party card manufacturers build the cards to their own spec and may use different amounts and qualities of memory to suit either a high performance card, or a budget card, they may overclock the card and fit a beefy heatsink or add some extras like Asus do. All in all, there's not usually much difference between a card made by one manufacturer to another but some may have a higher clock speed (pre-overclocked) so it would be worth going for the best bang-for-buck card. For the 6800GT, if you buy the BFG 6800gt OC version, it's overclocked to 6800 ultra speeds and comes with a lifetime warranty. Personally, i'd prefer the 6800GT because it hase more pixel pipelines and shader moel 3.0 support. The x800pro is a fine card too, but in this case, i'd prefer the Nvidia. As far as bottlenecking goes, these cards are more than capeble of running with your processor, in fact, they would still be capeble of running well with a AMD64 4000+ and upwards. AMD Athlon XP2200+ Aero7 lite 1GB Crucial pc2700 Abit NF7-s V2.0 80GB Seagate SATA 120GB Seagate SATA Geforce4 Ti4200 128mb Benq FP767-12 17" 12ms SB Audigy 2 ZS

Sweet, thanks for the in-depth response. Time to go sell my Radeon 9600XT and buy that BFG :D Bye and thanks again. - Mark

Another suggestion if I may... If you end up getting the 6800, you might want to consider getting a quiet fan for it. It's a bit loud for me and I had to get another fan for mine. I ended up getting the Zalman VF700-alu, and it's quiet as a mouse now. It works really great and it comes with heatsinks for the memory on the video card as well. Good Luck Eli