I see your predicament with a 350w PSU....

http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=21425&category_id=646&manufacturer_id=0&tid=ocz500sxs

Maybe find an upgrade for that too.... ? 

Work fine for me in all versions of Quake that I care to play, works fine with Radiant, works fine with Hammer. (This is with Vista by the way, mileage may vary in other operating systems of course).

The sole problem I've had with Quake since switching to ATI cards was some display corruption in some versions that was fixed by setting gl_ztrick to 0.

Other than that, the main things I've noticed since switching from nvidia cards is better price/performance ratio, lower power consumption, more speed and stability, regular driver updates, better colour and "shit just working".

The one thing I miss from the nvida stuff is that they had more fully featured software (specifically management of dual monitors, they had some nifty features like shortcuts to swap windows between monitors and shit like that).

I had a 1950 pro and now the HD4870, very happy with both. Using ATI cards at work now too because I had some problems with Maya and our asset building tools using nvidia drivers which were magically fixed by swapping to an ATI card. 

Not trying to preach, just throwing it out there to counterbalance the anti-ATI stuff ;)

I don't have any problems with brightness in Quake or any game using default settings in both the driver control panel and the game options. As with everything else I've had far less problems (as in, basically none) with Quake than I had using nvidia stuff. 

You are on Linux (aren't you), you want nvidia. 

Like the 180.84 BETA driver which GTA tells you to install, and how it caused SYSTEM CRASH, LOSS of MOUSE and KEYBOARD!

I've never had any problems with their stable release though...

The only ATI card which I ever use is the X1300 in one of our work machines, which I think is fried, because I get some nasty distortions in Fitz and AGLQuake. But like I said, I think the card is a bit fried....

I must admit that unless NVidia bring in some cool features I will be converting to ATI next time I upgrade, because I want DirectX 10.1 - I like eye candy! And their anti-aliasing is unbeatable, from what I gather...

At the end of that day, I'm only really speaking from a gaming performance angle, it depends entirely what you want from a card.... 

that I say "I must admit" too much... 

Not sure about that, ATIs drivers improved a lot, open source and proprietary. There are still a lot of bug reports though.
Of course Nvidia has the better linux drivers at the moment.

By the way is it possible to use an onboard nvidia card in Linux and the pci-express card in windows? 

that Asus N10J netbook I bought for my girfreind for Christmas has switachble graphics - Intel GMA for long batterly life, and NVidia 9300 GS for gaming/performance. There's a button on the side to switch between the two. You then have to re-boot.

So there must be a way of doing it in a PC, just dont ask me how. 

Like the 180.84 BETA driver which GTA tells you to install, and how it caused SYSTEM CRASH, LOSS of MOUSE and KEYBOARD!

Just minor inconvenient side-effects then, no big deal. Reminds me of the anti-malarials i once took a course of: I read the booklet and was excited to see many hundreds of possible terrible side-effects, one of which being actual malaria. Well great. 

his stomach pumped or something, and ended up loosing both of his legs to MRSA... 

> By the way is it possible to use an onboard nvidia
> card in Linux and the pci-express card in windows

It appears so (as long as your bios supported it as some trashy bioses may automatically disable onboard video if another video card is found), but it mightn't be easy. You'd have to configure dual monitors under linux, and only use the onboard nvidia.

http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxAndDualMonitors.html

It ~may~ also be an anlternative to enter bios between OS reboots and switch primary video. 

Why should I configure dual monitors?
My onboard card has dvi and vga
my monitor too
I'v got a dvi and a vga cable

And if the gfx card has dvi and vga? 

I cant even use the latest last few, they reduce my screen to 4 bit color in 320*240 for some reason. 

seem pretty solid compared to nvidia. I know i was positively surprised with my first ati (9800something i think), until it fried after a year or two :( 

Yeah... you don't really want to mess with dual monitors. It's just the only way i can imagine getting windows to use one card and linux the other, as the bios will generally designate one video card as the main one. ... I've never actually done it.

Ati drivers are meant to be improving anyway, but imho Linux + Nvidia is great. 

I just found out that there is a 9600gso with 256bit si and 48 shader units with a 55nm core. That card should be ideal for my psu. 

How is it bad?

It's kind of like going from dial-up to cable/dsl or whatever... you can't really go back once you've lived the good life!

In all seriousness, I've had almost zero issues with dual monitors in winxp/vista with either ati or nvidia cards/drivers.

Unless you're talking about linux or something, in which case well, of course it isn't going to work without extreme pain and misery, it's linux yeah? 

I had some issues with dual monitors and Windows XP on my Macbook Pro. The Apple provided Boot Camp drivers don't support it properly, so I had to install a hacked driver. NVidia, in all their wisdom, don't provide generic laptop drivers anymore, which sucks.

But then, I hardly use Windows and with the hacked driver, everything works great. I have to agree with Frib on how you can't really go back from dual monitors once you used them. Especially if you are a designer or programmer I guess. 

i've had dual monitors working on my macbook pro for months now. (i'm assuming you are talking about using the built in lcd + external monitor? not 2 externals?)

i didn't have to get hacked drivers either, iirc, i got mine off of apple's site (my mbp has an ati card). 

It worked fine in my old MBP that had an ATI card, but doesn't work well in my NVidia card. You can activate dual monitors, set it to extend the desktop etc, but you cannot set the external monitor to be the primary monitor... 

I use dual monitors on my Macbook Pro in OSX and I would have a hard time going back. Just being able to do things like write code and debug on the main monitor and have the log file running on the laptop screen add so much to productivity. 

Sleepwalkr - Do you have Linux on the mac too ? How's it go. I'm thinking about buying a mac keyboard (to use with linux). Those new things are great.
Frib - Sure linux can suck sometimes. I dunno about dual monitors though, my desk is way small. 

No, I don't run Linux on my MBP and can't give you any hints. Sorry. 

http://en.expreview.com/2009/01/21/specs-of-nvidia-geforce-9600gt-green-edition-leaked.html 

"green edition" that uses less wattage?