Buy at the price break. There is no need to pay 500-600 dollars on a card that will be old news in a few months when the new cards come out.

So you're planning to use the 9800 and the GTX in SLI? imo the cards need to be identical  

But GTX275 is one of the best in a market, if you have money then you should buy it

On the ATI front you could get a 4870 x 2 (dual card in one slot, so like two 4870's with crossfire on non-crossfire boards) or you could hold your horses and wait a month or two for the new 5800 series to come out, i guess the 300's will be out then/soon aswell so you can get benchmarks and take the best.

But to be honest if you are definately going to replace the seond 9800 in the future with the second of an sli pair your best bet will be nvidia. And as you mentioned what with new card ranges coming soon you may aswell hang on, if you don't get one of the new range you can still get the old 200 range for a lot cheaper

I have an evga 285 GTX.  Love it, runs cool too, also Evga gives LIFETIME warranties.  BUT it is HUGE.  So look to where you gpu slot is on the mobo as it might block stuff...I mean, HUGE.

I've got 4870's in my rig and they "work" let me explain.

ATI drivers for me have been unreliabile and buggy. The graphics adaptors may perform well in bechmarks but the rendering artifacts I get and the strange rays that show up in games is horribly distracting. When I was running Nvidia boards I never had these issues. It's also not just me there's lots of complaints about ATI drivers screwing up renders in Direct X based games. As such, I'll probably never own another ATI card. As long as the drivers maintain this once a month update release sechdule I would AVOID any ATI device.

Go with Nvidia even if it's slightly slower or more expensive than the competing ATI solution. I'm unhappy with my crossfire 4870 1gb models in ways that make me want to suck the $300 loss and buy new Nvidia boards.

Also I noticed you only had 2gb's of ram you may serriously want to consider going to 4 or even 8gbs (if you're running an x64 copy of vista or windows 7) as both OS will use nearly 2gbs of ram on a clean install.

I'm upping to at least 4gb when win7 is released, currenlty I'm using 32-bit xp, but 64 windows 7 as soon as i can. The 2gbs is left over from when i upgraded my mobo a few months ago and had to switch from DDR2 to DDR3 memory, back when DDR3 prices were double what they are now.

(Overclocked the RAM so i didn't want to occupy all the DIMM slots...)

My only concern on the 275 is it's 896mb frame buffer, using 512mb cards AA and High resolutions slow down wayyy too much. Do you guys think 896mb on a 448bit bus is enough for 1900x1200 at 2AA? The benchmarks i've found usually only show this combo in Crysis... which does not flatter ANY card.

Given the space restictions of a standard case/mobo configuration, I've often wondered why graphics card manufacturers continue to make them bigger and bigger... and in some/many cases where they just will not fit at all... unless the rig is hacked/modified to accomodate them.  It makes no sense to me that graphics cards are getting bigger and bigger while cases remain the same or are getting smaller... eg, mini and micro systems.

I have a Galaxy 9800GT Low Powered @ 1gb which is a good 2" shorter than most standard cards of today and would fit in just about any case without issue/having to hack/reconfigure, so I wonder why manufacturers can not/do not make other modern cards to a similar size.  Surely the technology is there to make shorter high-end cards to fit easily into standard cases... perhaps even using 2 thin wafers in a double-decker array to shorten them, with ventilation slots and the cooling in between them.

I've often wondered these things since purchasing my 9800GT.... how size restictions affect sales of the GTX200 series.  At the time of purchase I did investigate the possibility of a GTX 200 series card, but neither of my local stores stock them (but will place a customer order) because of size issues and several returns due to not fitting.  I settled for the 9800 because of its shorter length and the GTX260, 275, etc, possibly posing installation problems in my case.

Any other thoughts??

The drivers thing isn't for YOU it's for everyone ..its what makes the ATI hardware choice a VASTLY inferior product in the opinion of anyone that doesn't care to HAVE to update thier drives every single week to get good performance or keep it from degrading.

ATI is like a lamboughini body powered by a volkswagen bug engine...

I've played Crysis with pretty decent visuals on my 9600.