[homrok]

Originally Posted by johnross2007

If you get that 1-gig card and Vista make sure you get Vista 64-bit so it will recognize all of the ram. The 1-gig is a little overkill and you might be better off getting a 9800GTX, though I don't really remember what your budget is. There's a reason the best single-GPU card only has 512MB of ram; 1 gig isn't necessary or even very useful yet. Not to say you won't see improved performance, but I doubt it would be worth the extra $80.

edit: oh and about PCI Express 2.0. don't worry about it; it is ahead of its time. It doubles the bandwidth between it and the motherboard, but the GPU STILL doesn't fill up the current generation system. It would be nice to know what motherboard you have though.

That sounds good, i got a little frightend when i saw the pci express 2.0 all the sudden, I will post all my computer specs as i get back home from work, my budges id say is at the very very most 400 including tax, but id like to save as much as possible 200 or 300 on a card is acceptable 300 might be stretching it a little but still doable 400 than i would lack future funds for vista laster on, 200 to me is alright but id rather spend closer to 300 on a card i dont have to upgrade next week, than 200 for a card that i can't use max grafix on and still might have to upgrade in a soon future.

Edit: might be hard to understand but I want a kick ass card compared to my 7900 and still be able to put a couple of dollars away for future investments but as i said i want a big grafix change from the 7900 so im still not afraid of spending some cash on it.

Edit2: as said before I want to be able to play Age of Conan on a good grafix setting, I read in a newegg rev on one of the 9600 cards than he was in Beta and he could play it on max setting, still not sure what the rest of the system contain, but im not locking myself into 9600 could just as well be a 9800 sept ive seen that the 9800 ones are around 600 dollars or close