[Updated and Edited] Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been doing some gaming pc research and decided on purchasing one of the top of the line video cards that will last me a good while. But before I buy it, I’ve found that those cards will not fit on my current motherboard. I’ve got a Dell e510/5150, the heat sink on the cpu is blocking the way. Therefore, I plan on building a new gaming pc out of some parts from my Dell, and a new motherboard. Below are some findings from a little bit of research and discussion with rapture on the best hardware to get into. Nvidia has the top of the line card right now with the 8800gtx, ATI is close on their heels with an upcoming card described below. Nvidia also designs motherboards, and it looks like the Nvidia nforce 680i is one of the top dogs at the moment. If your new to game pc building (as I was a couple weeks ago) Nvidia does the design, but they do not manufacture any of their cards. You will be buying the card from one of the 3rd party manufacturers such as BFG, EVGA, and many others. Some of these companies will overclock the graphics card and tweak some stuff on the motherboards to separate themselves from the competition.

rapture is planning another gaming pc build as well, here’s one of his comments:
“I’ve done some more research on video cards as I’m trying to plan out my next computer purchase.

ATI is soon going to release the ATI R600 which will likely be called something like the Radeon X2900. Reportedly, it will jump ahead of the NVIDIA 8800 cards. Actually, the reports are that it blows them out of the water. This card is due out in Q1 07.

The performance increase sounds amazing. Tests have shown a 20% improvement in graphics while gaming over the NVIDIA 8800. Holy Cow. 20%. One NVIDIA 8800 is faster than two of just about every other card in the world. It even runs faster than two NVIDIA 7900 GTX’s in SLI mode.

Now the ATI R600 is supposed to run 20% faster than the NVIDIA 8800. Holy crap.

These guys got to test the R600: http://level505.com/2006/12/30/the-full-ati-r600-test/1/

They played several games at 1600×1200 will 4-16 times full screen anti-aliasing and 4-16 times anisotropic filtering and they blew away the 8800.

Rumors are that the R600 will take a lot of juice. It could require more than 250W of power. This had led some to believe that we’ll see this card as an EXTERNAL attachment to the computer.

The R600 will cost about $600 bucks.”

We’ll continue to post our findings and eventually, hopefully some pictures of what we end up with.