Wrong in one thing. ATi's hardware is more powerful in raw throughput. The fact that it needs about 1/3 of the silicon area just shows how inefficiently the new nVidia cards are designed.

I did say in very general terms though. Throughput is only one measure too, there's typically a lot more silicon in NVidia, hence a higher manufacturing cost. The point is that ATI and NVidia can't be exactly compared like for like, and NVidia tend to be more expensive in cards that are generally considered to be the match of a similar ATI.

Either way, it's a detail that probably doesn't need to figure in Nick's thinking.

J-Man's suggestion is a good one, look at the most demanding game you're going to play and get a card higher than that. The 8800 / 9800 from NVidia seems to exceed the recommended specs on most games I've looked at, so they're a fairly safe bet and you can get hold of them for around £100 (ish)

what processor you running with that minty?

I have Nvidia 8800GT and I love it. Oblivion with full settings fps 60-90.

For source make sure you get a big processor as they make all the difference in source based games and get say a cheap 8800 gt and it will run anything soruce based on full pretty much your looking at

8800 GT = £80
Cpu - £130
then the oter parts
Mobo - £50 mayby more mayby less depends
ram - somewhere around £40
case - god noes what you liek really from £5 - £100
HD - 500 gb £40
PSU - £60 that one pilsy has is very good ill let him blag it to you later

Thats £400 without a OS or case included but if you have XP on your pc now use that would br best for gaming as you see 30 - 40 fps drop with vista on source games
Also then factor in stuff like CD drives etc and accesorys like fans and big pink fluffly lights

Ah right I see. Just to let you know I am going on holiday in The New Forest for a week (camping) tomorrow. Too tired to create a thread so I just post it here.

edit - Oh yeah, I was gonna get Vista. Are you saying that it isn't worth getting it if I already have an XP disk?

HOLY SHIT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T DO IT MAN!!!!!
thank god i post this in time, vista is a heap of shit, almost all big businesses and contractors are either rolling back to xp or going to the dark side (mac). you need a 1/3 more resources to run the same software on vista as to xp. why do you think apple have made a massive comeback, because vista FAILED!

100% agreement on this post, vista crashes, it hogs more resources and its just generally shit, the only reason you would want vista is for dx10 (and lets face it the reasons for doing that right now, even a year after it comes out all dx10 is good for is a few nice particle effects, barely anything of real value)

I use 64 bit vista and havent had any compatability or stability issues. Since SP1, Vista's performance has improved greatly too. It also makes networking a lot easier and security is improved over XP.

Having said that, its true that it is a resource hog so I guess it come down to whether you want to spend extra to be able to take advantage of DX10 or not.

Why all the Vista hate ?, runs fine for me.

And the internet has informed me that some games run faster on Vista .

But I've never had XP so I can't compare the two.