What hardware should I buy?

Do you know of a fairly good nvidea card that run 3d apps well like Maya, and Lightwave? Basically, I'm looking for open-gl support. Also, can you run games on 64 bit Vista?

I just got a GeForce 7600GT which is a reasonable balance of performance vs price.

If you want to use OpenGL on Vista, forget ATI completely. Their so-called Vista-compatible drivers are an abomination.

I use a 7600GT too, you can get it for AGP if that's what you need and it performs pretty well. It's not directx10, but that doesn't really matter for anything right now.

I have a BFG 8600GT, good card which you can get from about £165.

There are some games that wont run on vista. I know some games seem to run on 64bit but not 32bit vista though.

£165 for a 8600GT? That's an awful price! You can get an 8800GT for that sort of money, albeit not a BFG. But even so, a BFG 8600GT didn't ought to be much over £100.

I have this:

http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=17996&category_id=611&manufacturer_id=0&tid=zt-88tes3p-fsp

IMHO it's the best price /performance combo available ATM.

Darkheart

I have an EVGA 8600GTS "Superclocked".. cost me about 150$ from Newegg. I wish I had waited until the 8800GT was released, but I'm pretty happy with the purchase on the whole.

http://www.ebuyer.com/search/?strSearch=&bolShowAll=true&intStoreID=2&intCatID=215&intSubcatUID=2058&intMfrID=1047&bolShowAll=true

Same card, but cheaper here.

*Edit*

weird, there *was* an 8800GT there at about £165 or thereabouts...

Personally, I rather think my 8800 GTX is pretty good.

Does anyone else's 7600GT (or better) not support 320x240? I couldn't believe that they would phase out all resolutions below 640x480 with a new card like this, but it seems to be true.

Puki,
The 8800 GTX performs just 3% better than the 8800 GT and the GTX costs nearly twice as much.

Darkheart

I can use 320x240 on my ATI X1650XT which is in the same league as the 7600GT...

8800GT

If you can afford it then get the 8800GT.

ccl have a much better after sales service than ebuyer to id pay a bit extra to get it from ccl. I had a trade account with them a few years ago and there a great company to deal with.

Well I don't know if this is any help to you, but I just researched the best price/performance for a CPU and video card for a buddy of mine whose PC has started crashing constantly, and what I arrived at, going by benchmarks, and with an eye towards games, was an AMD 64 X2 6000+ for $160, and a Geforce 8800 GT with 512mb of ram for around $260.

The AMD is perhaps their fastest chip available for gaming. They have some Phenom chips which are hard to find which are much more expensive and perform better in CPU benchmarks, but in the regular game benchmarks they actually performed worse.

And the only faster chips I could find were Intel ones, with the next best value after the AMD being the Core 2 Quad E6600 for $280.

But for almost twice the price (75% more) you're only going to get a 6% increase in speed in games, and a 16% speed increase in apps.

Beyond that there's two more Intel processors which are insanely priced at $700 and $980. These will kick ass at apps being rougly twice as fast as the AMD I listed above, but for current games you're talking only at most 105 fps, vs 80fps on the AMD. A 31% difference for 5.6x the cost.