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http://www.basichardware.com/cpu3.htmlChipsets - For almost all users, NVIDIA and ATI's lines of video card chipsets are the best solution. It's debatable which is better right now. NVIDIA's fastest (GeForce FX 5950 Ultra) is on par with, or a little slower than ATI's fastest (Radeon 9800 XT 256 MB). These are both very pricey though, and I wouldn't really recommend either due to the extreme prices for a fairly small performance increase. Plus, new cards are on their way out that will cost about the same but offer a huge performance increase. Early benchmarks show the nVidia 6800 Ultra (AKA NV40) performing double the speed of previous cards in some benchmarks. ATI also has a new product coming out - the Radeon X800 XT (AKA R420), and early benchmarks show it even outperforming the nVidia 6800 Ultra! However, if you can't wait for these cards and you have the money to burn, get the ATI Radeon 9800 XT if the absolute best performance is what you're after and money doesn't matter. At most other price levels, ATI is slightly outperforming NVIDIA also. This all depends on what game you play and what features are turned on though. ATI has a much better implementation than NVIDIA of some DirectX 9 features like Pixel Shader 2.0. In some newer games that take advantage of these features, the ATI cards will significantly outperform the NVIDIA cards.
Take a big step down in price, and you have ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB slightly outperforming NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5900. This is what I would consider the performance sweet spot. Not too pricey, but you still get great performance.
Take another step down and we find a price sweet spot. For under $130 you can get very respectable performance from the Radeon 9600 Pro. Another good option is the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, although it's quite a bit more expensive. The cheaper GeForce FX 5600 can be found for a little less than the Radeon 9600 Pro. For these cards (and cheaper ones), I suggest not using FSAA or anisotropic filtering (or at least limit it). You should still get good frame rates if you don't enable these options.
If you don't mind older technology and are very price conscious, a GeForce Ti 4200 (with 128 MB RAM) will still do okay in most of today's games (and you can even overclock it some). Tomorrow's games won't perform so well though! You can find this card for under $100.
# Cards - Choosing the actual brand of video card doesn't usually matter quite as much as the chipset. Most video cards using a given chipset are made according to a reference design from the manufacturer of the chipset. Thus, most of the video cards using the same chipset are very similar. Differences can appear in the amount of memory and / or the speed of the memory though. This can make a big difference in performance, particularly when overclocking. Taking all of this into consideration, I generally recommend getting one of the cheaper brands as long as it's a brand with a good reputation. I recommend the Saphire line of ATI cards. PowerColor is also okay.
For NVIDIA, I recommend all of these brands (listed with the best first). The ones I don't recommend aren't listed.
* Guillemot / Hercules
* Asus
* LeadTek
* PNY
* MSI
* Gigabyte
* Gainward
* EVGA
* AOpen
* Chaintech
* ECS
