Nvidia 8800! which one should i buy!?

at the moment most manufactures are just releasing stock speed 8800's. the 8800GTX is the more powerful of the two. if i were to recommend a manufacturer, it would definitely be either EVGA or XFX. because both have double lifetime warranties on all their cards. so if you sell them later, the person after you gets the warranty too (adds to the resale value, especially on places like eBay)

for the second part of your question. they might release a 8900 series later. in fact i would almost count on it the way the 7xxx series went. because ATI and Nvidia will try to out power each other. you can expect those (later cards) to be just as expensive too. but it will probably be months, or even a year before release them. you might want to hold out till ATI releases their R600 and see how it performs against the 8800GTX, and buy whichever is better.

I have seen a few eVga 8800GTS/X bundled with Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. When you spend $500 or more on a video card, doesn't hurt to get a $50 game free! They also have lifetime warranty.

Go for the BFG Tech 8800GTX Water Cooled version.

Okay, I didn't know 8800GTX is a budget. Well, from a couple of people that has this card already, they said that the cooler is hot. But they don't know how hot it is since there's no temperature display in the card's control panel on the current driver.

I don't consider it budget either really But OP said he couldn't go the extra $100-150 for the watercooling.

I've heard the same thing, that they run hot but no one is sure just how hot due to temps being disabled. Intriguing for sure haha

To Rodney_ws:

I have to agree with you on that. They are generally expected to drop to a 65nm process by the time the new ATI cards are expected. At least I think it was 65nm, its somewhere around there, don't quote me lol.

Makes it tough to buy now in a way knowing that change will be possibly only a few months away but I'm sort of tired of waiting. Just need to see more benchs on the 680i. hehe

Edited: Found the exact review I mentioned from firingsquad

I do not remember the "exact" numbers but I read yesterday a review where the card OC'd on stock cooling from 575/1800 stock to 620/1814. I think thats about the right number on the memory, it was a very small OC tho, they said wasn't stable at anything above 620ish tho.

I'll try to find the exact numbers, posting this to give an idea of OC, its not exact but what I remember reading. Still a little disappointing on the OC front.

Why dont you go with MSI, Leadtek or XFX? They have slightly different clock speeds as core clock- 513MHz and memory - 1584MHz according to this review.

No manufacturer EVER recommends overclocking :-\

Whoa whoa whoa... I started a thread just to answer this question, but I'll repost the linkage here, it contains all the air-cooled 8800GTX out right now, the water-cooled one just introduces a lot more problems, since your gonna need a lot more additional hardware... anyways:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2873

Have fun perusing