regardless tho, ATI cards are far superior to the 8 or 9 series nvidia cards and a much safer route...
Really? How do you figure that?
HD2XXX and HD3XXX series are an absolute waste of time which is what allowed the GF8 series to last from 2006 up until 2008. There simply was no competition from ATI.
Lets examine this closely
In the HD2XXX series the best card was the HD2900XT, was this better than the 8800GTX/Ultra at the time, no! In almost every single game save for Call Of Juarez the Geforce cards were anything from noticeably faster to significantly faster. Look it up if you have any doubts... The rest of the HD2K sereis wasn't even worth bothering about...
HD3XXX was better but still failed to do anything useful for ATI. HD3870 the highest performing single GPU part from the family was slower than the R2,000 GeForce 8800GT. The 3850 is about the same speed as the 8800GS at best every other time its slower.
The 3870X2 while faster than the 8800GTX was more than 14month late after the card it was competing with and even then it won synthetic tests, and lost some very crucial game tests. E.g Crysis amongst others...
The HD4XXX is where ATI may have gotten a lead and managed to give NVIDIA some very stiff competition. HD4870 made sure GTX280 and GTX260 prices dropped, in fact a new GTX260 216 came out because of the power of the 4870. Catalyst drivers improved dramatically. HD4870X2 is without a doubt the fastest single graphics card money can buy....
However right now, with Big Bang drivers (rel180) from NVIDIA, a GTX260 is almost always faster than HD4870 with Catalyst 8.11. The GTX260 is the same price.
The GTX280 also came down in price, but is faster than 4870 as it has always been but obviously slower than 4870X2.
For the fastest Graphics configuration money can buy, you have to go to NVIDIA 3-way GTX280 SLI, and not 4-way CrossfireX.
With NVIDIA you'll get
Hardware Physics
Accelerated video encoding you can use now
Better compatibility
Cooler running cards
lower power consumption cards
Quiter running cards
Get one thing clear, ATI has come a long way and they deliver impressive performance per dollar. However as complete products they hav some distance before they can claim to be a match for NVIDIA solutions.