Looking for a quality, high performance gfx card

[takemehomegrandma]

Hi. I am upgrading my PC at the moment. I am looking for a quality, high performance 3D gfx card. I want "the best". I have read various tests and it seems like the ATI 9800 pro is beating the GeForce 5800 ultra hands down in almost every aspect, including one of the most important ones; NOISE! I have decided to go the ATI route.

But what brand would you recommend? Hercules? Sapphire?

The 9800 seems to be quite difficult to find in stock though, and that is a problem because I want it *now* ;-). This is one of the reasons I am not interested in upcoming cards like the GF5900 and 9800 with 256 MB DDR2 memory (the price of the latter is another ;-)).

I found a brand called "powercolor" in stock, but I have never heard of that one, and they had a somewhat dodgy website that gave bad impression ...

[takemehomegrandma]

Karlos wrote:
Well, there's high-performance, and there's high-performance...

If money is not an issue :-) you could go for one of these...

I think you can get it for under $1000 :-)

-edit-

Incidentally, it wipes the floor with anything either nVidia or ATI have yet come up with (I have seen for myself)...

That one looks cool, but it's
1) More of a workstation card than a gamers card (I want the latter)
2) DirectX 8.1
3) A little too expensive  :-P

[takemehomegrandma]

I thought the recent customer-orientated ATI high range cards were quite noisy as well?

They have a fan too, but the noise level is not even close to the latest nvidia cards. The noise from geforce fx is often compared to a vacuum cleaner, and you might actually find it difficult to stay in the same room as the computer for a longer period of time.