What Video Card should I get?

Buy at the price break. There is no need to pay 500-600 dollars on a card that will be old news in a few months when the new cards come out.

So you're planning to use the 9800 and the GTX in SLI? imo the cards need to be identical  

But GTX275 is one of the best in a market, if you have money then you should buy it

No, i was planning on possibly getting a second gtx down the road, but not right away. The problem is one 9800 burned out so the surviving one will be a physX/second monitor card for the gtx.

All the benchmarks i have looked at show the 275 fairly close to the 285, but also not too far from the 260, which makes me wonder if a 260 might be the better bet...

I am planning on getting the card before christmas if i can, i was hoping that the 300 series would come out soon and the 200 series prices would drop, anyone know when that is happening?

Edit: Kitkun, you weren't the first reply, you must be slowing down

On the ATI front you could get a 4870 x 2 (dual card in one slot, so like two 4870's with crossfire on non-crossfire boards) or you could hold your horses and wait a month or two for the new 5800 series to come out, i guess the 300's will be out then/soon aswell so you can get benchmarks and take the best.

But to be honest if you are definately going to replace the seond 9800 in the future with the second of an sli pair your best bet will be nvidia. And as you mentioned what with new card ranges coming soon you may aswell hang on, if you don't get one of the new range you can still get the old 200 range for a lot cheaper

I bought a ASUS 275 GTX one month ago for 200 Euro. Mid prices for top-performance! Low noise, too.

I have an evga 285 GTX.  Love it, runs cool too, also Evga gives LIFETIME warranties.  BUT it is HUGE.  So look to where you gpu slot is on the mobo as it might block stuff...I mean, HUGE.

9800gtx+'s are 10.5" long, just like all the gtx cards... They barely cleared my hard drives until the second one died.

They were getting old anyway, maybe it's a sign.

A month or two??? Hopefully the new series will come out soon, but the ATI cards might bring down the 200 series prices too. If they drop enough a 285 would be pretty nice... (Kind of an nvidia fanboy)

I've got 4870's in my rig and they "work" let me explain.

ATI drivers for me have been unreliabile and buggy. The graphics adaptors may perform well in bechmarks but the rendering artifacts I get and the strange rays that show up in games is horribly distracting. When I was running Nvidia boards I never had these issues. It's also not just me there's lots of complaints about ATI drivers screwing up renders in Direct X based games. As such, I'll probably never own another ATI card. As long as the drivers maintain this once a month update release sechdule I would AVOID any ATI device.

Go with Nvidia even if it's slightly slower or more expensive than the competing ATI solution. I'm unhappy with my crossfire 4870 1gb models in ways that make me want to suck the $300 loss and buy new Nvidia boards.

Also I noticed you only had 2gb's of ram you may serriously want to consider going to 4 or even 8gbs (if you're running an x64 copy of vista or windows 7) as both OS will use nearly 2gbs of ram on a clean install.

This. My 9600 GSO has been nothing but good to me.

I'm upping to at least 4gb when win7 is released, currenlty I'm using 32-bit xp, but 64 windows 7 as soon as i can. The 2gbs is left over from when i upgraded my mobo a few months ago and had to switch from DDR2 to DDR3 memory, back when DDR3 prices were double what they are now.

(Overclocked the RAM so i didn't want to occupy all the DIMM slots...)

My only concern on the 275 is it's 896mb frame buffer, using 512mb cards AA and High resolutions slow down wayyy too much. Do you guys think 896mb on a 448bit bus is enough for 1900x1200 at 2AA? The benchmarks i've found usually only show this combo in Crysis... which does not flatter ANY card.

Um, I had an 8800GTX man, the 285 GTX is bigger.  8800GTX was fine, the 285 blocks 4 sata ports on my mobo.  Much bigger.

Given the space restictions of a standard case/mobo configuration, I've often wondered why graphics card manufacturers continue to make them bigger and bigger... and in some/many cases where they just will not fit at all... unless the rig is hacked/modified to accomodate them.  It makes no sense to me that graphics cards are getting bigger and bigger while cases remain the same or are getting smaller... eg, mini and micro systems.

I have a Galaxy 9800GT Low Powered @ 1gb which is a good 2" shorter than most standard cards of today and would fit in just about any case without issue/having to hack/reconfigure, so I wonder why manufacturers can not/do not make other modern cards to a similar size.  Surely the technology is there to make shorter high-end cards to fit easily into standard cases... perhaps even using 2 thin wafers in a double-decker array to shorten them, with ventilation slots and the cooling in between them.

I've often wondered these things since purchasing my 9800GT.... how size restictions affect sales of the GTX200 series.  At the time of purchase I did investigate the possibility of a GTX 200 series card, but neither of my local stores stock them (but will place a customer order) because of size issues and several returns due to not fitting.  I settled for the 9800 because of its shorter length and the GTX260, 275, etc, possibly posing installation problems in my case.

Any other thoughts??

Actually the size of video cards are so large I'm thinking of buying a full blown server tower for my next case so I can easily work in my case. My current case is a NIGHTMARE! 5 hard drives, 2 4870's, 2 dvd drives.... its a nightmare! all that in a midsize atx case.... gah! anyway, on target:

Crysis isn't really that demanding compared to some of the higher end RTS games out there (Forged Alliance springs to mind). I've found the 4870 1gb models work fine for playing at 2560x1600 and I've never had issues playing Crysis since it released new. My dual 8800GTX setup worked fine at 1680x1050 (I got the larger monitor the same time I picked up the new graphics cards) so I'm guessing here but I doubt you'll have an issue with a 448bit bus. Just a guess though, but again I do honestly feel I've gotten burned having bought the 4870's instead of the Nvidia line... bad drivers just ruin everything.

The drivers thing isn't for YOU it's for everyone ..its what makes the ATI hardware choice a VASTLY inferior product in the opinion of anyone that doesn't care to HAVE to update thier drives every single week to get good performance or keep it from degrading.

ATI is like a lamboughini body powered by a volkswagen bug engine... :p

More like a corvette with water instead of gas in its tank, greatness would be so close if only the owners gave a f#ck...

The gtx 275 is based on a 10.5" PCB, just like all the other 200 series cards, other than the 250 (which is a 9800gtx+ btw) at 9"

The cards will fit, just barely like my old ones, and hopefully i'll be getting a new case soon anyway (thanks to anyone who helped on that thread as well) so the space issue is not a concern.

Forged alliance is one of the games the old 512 cards struggled in, my point about cysis was that any card gets crap performance in cysis at 2560x1600 with AA at even 2x so it was not a good metric of performance. Thanks for the answer though, 896mb is probably enough for just about anything out now.

I've played Crysis with pretty decent visuals on my 9600.