Topic, 

4870, no questions asked.

I was on an nvidia spree for awhile, but went back home to ati and I have to say I am just utterly in awe of the card that is the 4850, if that tells you anything about the 4870.

However, I feel like ATI nowadays is constantly playing catch up with nvidia in the driver dept, and features, such as game profiles. Nvidia usually has a list of damn near every game, and if you want to edit it you can, whereas ATI has none that I have found. They have to be custom made; also, their profile editor is no where close to the ease of use as nvidia's is.

I have also found that as of late, my card is having issues with anti aliasing even if it is turned on. This is more a driver issue then a hardware issue, but it seems like whenever I had my nvidia cards, even if the drivers were not updated for a certain game, the most basic of things still worked such as AA and aniso. With my 4850, I find myself waiting for new drivers to get the AA and other features to work properly.

So, if you want better driver support, I would go with nvidia, but right now, bang for buck, ati is crushing nvidia, but like I said, it also, with me at least seems to come with a price.

Doesn't work with vista 64, the driver signing bullshit stops it.

thanks for the responses, im not really interested in the chaper card at all, IM justlooking for the best card. I returned my 4850X2 because I was getting worse performance when I had crosfire on and I was using the whole card. wheni disabled corssfire, I was getting the same performance as my asus 4850! so now i have the $260 back and looking to reinvest it in the better Single GPU card for the price.

Since you had some bad expriences with ATI, try Nvidia this time around. 

As long as it is the GTX260 216 you can;t go wrong with either card to be honest. The 4870 is probably the slightly better al lrounder in games but the 260 runs cooler and has better folding performance if that is your thing. I would go for the cheapest tbh.

Thanks for the input