Couple things I forgot to mention. First, I have a 24" Samsung LCD that I absolutely love so I do like to run at 1920x1200 (the native resolution). And the card is going in my existing machine with a Q6600 (overclocked to 3.0 Ghz) with 4GB of RAM running WinXP. But the key is that I have an Abit IX38 Quad GT mobo (which has been running great) which I believe only supports CrossFire. So I think that's going to make my decision for me.
But I'm not going Crossfire right away and it's mostly on principle. I see it as just a conspiracy to get twice our money. I remember way back when I was first building machines putting together a couple of dual Voodoo machines for people and it never seemed like a good investment to me (twice the money for 30-40% more improvement). Also, for some reason I'm loathe to usually spend more than $200 for a new video card, mainly because you have to get a new one every 18 months or so. In fact, at almost $300 this purchase will be the most I've spent for a video card in a long time. I guess I should have also added that I'm not a cutting-edge FPS kinda gamer, I'm mostly strategy/RPG with a few FPS titles thrown in when one I really like comes along. I don't really have any desire to play Crysis and still spend a lot of my time playing Civ 4. I think I'm going to get one of the 4870 cards and that leaves the option open to add a 2nd for Crossfire at some point down the line. Thanks for the advice guys. ---- Brian
