Nvidia card with dedicated physX or ATI radeon card?

My current system has a 9800gt currently in it and with the new system im building i was throwing around the idea of going with an Nvidia card(any suggestions?) and running the 9800gt as a dedicated physX card. I'm also wondering if going with an ATI card would be a good idea instead of the Nvidia w/physX card.

here is the build so far:
ASUS P8P67-M Pro B3 Intel P67 Motherboard
intel i5 2500K unlocked 3.30 ghz
700 watt psu
250gb hitachi 7200 hdd (will upgrade eventually)
Running windows 7 64bit


What kind of card would you guys recommend....my budget for the card is anywhere from $150 to $180 (I will stray a little higher for the price, but it must be worth it)

thanks guys!!!

You can use the 9800GT for PhysX with ATI too, you just need to use a "community patch" (search: GenL V1.04ff)

Anyway for cards in that price range you're basically looking at GTX460, HD 5850, or HD 6850.

The 5850 is generally the fastest card but the 460 is no slouch. Either of those are faster than the 6850 by a small amount. However, two 6850s in crossfire will probably be better than CF 5850 or SLI 460 due to the CF improvements made by AMD.

None in particular...i'm basically looking to get into pc gaming (more so than before) and I'm looking to build an all-rounder with options for upgrade later.

Mafia 2: Sucks
Metro 2033: Sucks
Batman: Arkum Asylum: Not bad (My Video on the game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUOr4cFWY-s)
Cryostasis: Are you freaking kidding me??? That game is horrible
UT3: Yeah that can run on 4-5 year old hardware.

I would get a 6850 + 9800GT. You can get them both working no problem. If you need help msg me on here. I suggest the 6850 because AMD cards tend to outperform nVIDIA cards in this price segment. Not only that but AMD cards offer better Video Quality (when watching any sort of video be it divx, MPEG2/4, x264/h264 etc... Toms has an article on this). AMD cards also offer superior Multi-card scaling and their drivers are no better and no worse than nVIDIAs nowadays (I am currently using the Catalyst 11.4 drivers... they work beautifully).

XFX offers great deals on the Radeon HD 6850 1GB cards and couples that with a Double Lifetime Guarantee. This means that should you choose to sell your card, the person who purchases it also is entitled to a lifetime guarantee (as seen here: http://xfxforce.com/en-us/features [...] nty.aspx). XFX support is also very good (slightly better than eVGA who are also very good).

Look I use both AMD and nVIDIA graphics but I will admit to prefer AMD and am not ashamed to admit it. I figure I should admit it since I am also recommending their product to you.

As for PhysX on the whole... the titles tend to suck. Good games tend not to use PhysX due to the lackluster performance issues associated with PhysX.

Good luck

Okay so some mixed results here lol.....
Right now I'm leaning more towards the GTX460 with a physX card for the time being, and eventually upgrade to GTX460 SLI because from what i read I hear the 460's have some hidden potential when SLI'd (from what i understand). BUT I am considering the 5850 very much too as iive heard the same thing about those in crossfireX.

The only reason I'm pushing EVGA is because my last card was an EVGA 9800gt and that thing has been going strong for 4(ish) years with no problems.

by the way it sounds it's going to be an even draw, damned if you do damned if you don't.

Big difference in DirectX 11 tesselation performance, with the GTX 460 being much better than the 5850. If you want more "future-proofing", the 460 will handle newer games with tesselation better than the 5850.

Look for the EVGA FTW version, which comes with the highest factory overclock of any GTX 460. If not, get at least get a Superclocked or SSC+ version and overclock yourself. The reason being that EVGA uses higher quality chips for its higher end versions (vs. the vanilla reference EVGA model).