It’s going to less than $500? How much less?
I’ve only seen the same article you have. I had not heard of this before today.
Jayrot, I think I love you. I’ve just put in an order for an A64 3500+ with a gig of RAM and a 256Mb 9800 card. I had a little trepidation about it, but first-hand accounts are always a winner. I’m glad yours is “smokin”. I’m pretty sure mine will be too 
Max 
No! Bad! Boo! Hiss! A fanless card will heat up far quicker than a fanned cooling solution, so unless you’re getting uber-low-end, you’re going to get some nasty lock-ups on higher-end games.
Anyway, best graphics card in the $350 range is the GeForce 6800 GT. The x800 Pro suffers from having fewer pixel pipelines and older technology. While the uber-high end x800XT is the best card you can by, for the upper-midrange, the 6800 GT wins big…
The 6600 GT AGP version would be a superior choice over the Radeon 9800, though both are pretty close… and I just saw an R9800 Pro 256MB card, over on Newegg.com, for $177. Not bad.
Has anyone tried out the AMD 64 4000+ or FX-55 chips with 1024 cache?
Dammit D_Odds, I want answers.
If it comes in at the $350 price point, I think that may be something I’ll looka at as well.
Somebody should tell Gigabyte about the ATI Rage Fury Max. Or the Vodoo 5 5500. Or the XGI Volari. All video cards with dual-GPUs on board. Still, if I had the money, I would definatly want one. Or heck, see if you can run two of those cards in a SLI motherboard.
These chips are very fast, but you would be better off for gaming going with a 3500+ and then throwing the extra money into a better video card. Here is a pretty good review of those two chips, and this review compares them agains the 3.8ghz Pentium 4. Note that for gaming the Athlon 64 3500 beats out the 3.8ghz Pentium 4 without much problem.
On a lark, I installed NOLF:2 to try out with the new card. Very cool. In the past I was able to watch the cut sceens at full res, but not play the game - it looked like a slide show and made me want to puke.
Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind. I’m building a new gaming PC right now. I’ve got the motherboard, but I haven’t bought the chip yet. Here’s what I’m planning so far:
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard
AMD Athlon FX-55
2 GB Corsair XMS TWINX2048-3200PRO DDR400
nVidia GeForce 6800GT 256MB (one for now)
2 Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000 RPM SATA drives
500W Ultra X-Connect power supply (just discovered that this is 50W too little to run 2 nVidia 6800’s)
Soundblaster Audigy 7.1
I’m treating it as if money were no object (I wish). I’m sure that some things will get scaled down.
Who’s saying your power supply is not powerful enough? Despite early misgivings, the 380 watt power supply in the Antec Sonata is more than enough for a single (hearsay, as I haven’t built my new computer yet…I’m not paying $400 for a mobo). Your choice is 120 watts over that. As long as each vidcard has a dedicated feed, you shouldn’t have any issues.
I read it here.
I’m hoping they’re wrong because I already have the power supply.
I currently have a 9800 Pro I love (my hubby has one in his machine too, and he loves his as well), but man, I was really drooling over this card the other day.