[Animal]

Okay, here goes...

The FX series of cards were bloated and under engineered. There is a lot of belief that nVidia rushed them to market because ATI was kicking their buts with the 9700 and 9500 series.

What you want to look for is memory bandwith, 256bits being better than 128. This is not to be confused with RAM. For example the 9600XT 256MB card uses 256MB of 128bit DDR. The 9800XT 256MB uses 256MB of 256bit DDR. So you may have one card with 128bit memory running at 500MHZ and another card with 256bit memory running at 400MHZ, but the 256bit will be a faster card because of the memory bandwith.

Next thing you'll need to look at is the number of rendering pipelines, again the more the better. The ATI 9600 uses 4 pipelines, where as the 9800 uses 8. The 9800 is a much faster card in games that uses programmable shaders or DX9 games because of the 4 extra pipelines.

The same principles work for nVidia, I just used ATI because I own an ATI 9800XT.

When nVidia first launched their FX series of cards they were terrible underperformers. They sounded like F-16's, took up 2 slots in your case because of the huge cooling fans needed. I'm sure things have changed by now, however, I still feel that the ATI is a better engineered card, has better picture quality and offers the best overall real world performance.

Having said that, nVidia drivers are much, much better than ATI, although ATI is picking up their socks in that department. Open GL support in ATI drivers, in my opinion, is subpar. NWN for example will perform much better on nVidia hardware then it will on ATI's, but that is the only issue I've personally encountered with ATI. It took my 2 months of tweaking to get NWN to run at a decent frame rate.

One last piece of advise. Most newer cards support the AGP 3.0 spec, or 8X AGP. Some AGP 3.0 cards will not perform well unless your motherboard specifically supports AGP 3.0. The voltage requirements for AGP3.0 and AGP2.0 are different, so make sure your motherboard will support the new card that you want.

I'd suggest that you narrow your decisions down to the 9600 or the 5700. Stay away from any SE variants of the cards and concentrate on the top end models for that line, ie the XT or Ultra.