If you must go with an ATI card, go only with the ATI brand, but I strongly am against ATI. They have nothing but driver problems and are quite a bit slower than Nvidia cards in certain games. Plus, Nvidia is dominating the gaming market right now getting their logo put on all major titles. Many of them, like Call of Duty 2, are optimized for Nvidia and you don't get certain eye candy on ATI cards that you get with an Nvidia card. If you can afford an X1800XT, why not get a 7800GTX512? Its a bit more expensive, but it blows away the X1800XT in all benchmarks. Plus, Nvidia cards, like I said, have good driver support so you wont have to wait a month or two after a game's release to be able to play it well, because ATI has to get drivers written to support the game.