In need of some techie advice

also, any recommendations would be much appreciated! thanks!

You can use a single nVidia card with that board, but that is just blatently wasting money on the board, get an ATI card so you can make use of what that board is good at and crossfire a second in the future. Or if you really dont like ATI then switch over to an i5 build(price should be similar) or drop down to a 770 or 785g chipset so that you arent wasting your crossfire capabilities.

thanks for the help. sorry to offend if anyone got offended, i just had a bad experience in the past.

well, i'll just be flat out honest. the pc i'm 'building' has actually been running for about 2 months. i had a sapphire radeon hd4870 (100259-1GL model) and everything was running great for an hour, then the card just kept crashing. i don't know anything about overclocking, so i didn't even attempt to mess with any settings in bios or in windows (like previously mentioned, this is my first build). anyhow, this happened while i was running the settings on WoW maxed, someone told me that doing so could overheat a card? i don't know.

I guess the card has irreversible damage now because no matter what i watch or play, there are these division lines on my monitor. so that's why i was asking about a GTX card. however, if anybody could tell me what i did wrong IF i did something wrong, i'll be glad to listen.

If you didnt OC it at all it may just have been a faulty card and you should be able to return it under warranty.

When you put the new card in use Prime95 to load up the CPU and Furmark to stress the GPU so you can watch for over heating using something like hwmonitor

Well, I'm pretty S.O.L. I put a ticket in at Sapphire and they told me I have to go back to where I originally purchased the card along with my receipt, which I no longer have. I guess I just have to chalk it up as money lost and a lesson learned.

Further research into the matter today led me to find that a lot of people who purchased the same Sapphire 4870 I bought were also getting blue screens after a short amount of time. I suppose I was just one of those unlucky apples in the bunch to get paired up with a lemon   . Then again, it's my fault too for not keeping the receipt. Needless to say though that I'm a bit weary to ever purchase from Sapphire again.

I was wondering though if you or anybody really has any recommendations as to which Radeon graphics card(s) brand to buy from? I know crossfire is pretty big right now, and if I really am cheating myself out of potential by using Geforce instead of Radeon then I definitely want to stick with Radeon. I just plan on being more cautious this time around. . .

XFX comes with a double lifetime warranty, just make sure you register your card within 30 days of purchase, once you do that then you and who ever you sell it to later on have a lifetime warranty and if it ever fails they will replace it with an equivalent level card.. They also tend to use dual slot coolers which helps with cards like the 4850 where most brands dont.

cool, thanks a lot for the advice and the brand tip off.