Indecision 2008 (SLi & Crossfire card battle) plz read

So, I'm getting a new rig soon and I can't decide between four cards, I will be using SLi or CF depending on which card I get and I can't decide which one to get, and the one I get will determine which mobo I get b/c of the SLi/CF compatibility. So the cards are

One of these two ATi HD 4850 (1 GB)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 814102759)
or
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814121278

Reason for indecision between these two: the ASUS doesn't have any ratings but does have a better price.

OR one of these two nVidia 260GTX w/216 cores
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814130398
or
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814130400

Reason for indecision between these two: one is OC'd and one is not, I can OC the one that is not to save some cash, but would the money saved be worth it? (I'm not too OC-savvy but my roommate is, so he will help me with any OC-ing that will be done.)

So which ever one I decide on will be SLI'd or CF'd within a few months of getting it, the main question is which one and why? I know the ATi's are cheaper but are they really better in the benchmarks that everyone claims or are the nVidia's dominant like how the THG charts indicate? The PSU won't be an issue, i know that for certain, it will be an 850W, and the processor for the rig will be the E8500, and I'll be using 4 GB of 1066 memory. Comments, suggestions, and just about anything is welcome and appreciated.

Thanks again ^_^

Umm... benchmarks do not indicate gaming performance... The 260 GTX is definitely better, as it is more expensive. However, the 4870 1GB is definitely better than the 260 GTX, not by much but by enough. Get this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814131120

i dont like cf i guess because it didnt scale to well with my old 3xxxseries. felt like sli scales better but im sure these days there on par. i would recommend the old gtx260 since they can be found very cheap while the new gtx260 is much more expensive with min gain.

Memory clock on that one is only 925 MHz?

Umm... yeah a 25hz overclock not much but you can do more. The reason it is better is because it is the same price as the other ones and has a custom cooler.

im just saying out of my own test run i did with my 3850 in cf i gained maybe 2fps gain in crysis and in games like gears of war ut3 maybe 5-10fps max and some other games performed worse or the same. im not saying cf is bad im just saying the 3xxx series wasnt that great in the beginning im sure there much better now.
crossfire is more consistent over sli? have any sources?

Sorry I deleted the explanation before I posted. What I meant was that crossfire tends to be more consistent between different resolutions in the 4xxx series. The 3xxx series seemed to scale pretty well, though SLI was easier to configure and crossfire was and still is a bitch sometimes.

well there both good cant go wrong either way. If you play games like crysis nvidia (sli) would be the way to go. Other games such as ut3 cod4 run well on ati (cf).
if you plan to do sli check out the gtx260 old version priced dropped to 199$ on msi model!
=]

So I read up some more on the 4870 series and is it a 925 MHz 4 core GPU so it would be about 3.7Ghz total or am I mistaken?

For crossfiring 2 HD4870s you really should get a X48/38 .
Here's a couple of good links, one is about a chipset comparison with crossfiring 2 HD4850s. In my opinion the 8x/8x bandwidth of the P45 series would take an even bigger hit from the bandwidth with 2 HD4870s
http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=761
This other link is about CPU scaling with the HD4870x2
http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=770