Ok, I'm going with the 4870 now, SLI apparently isn't the way to go. Plus, I can crossfire it in the future if I want.

Thanks for those suggestions, I'm checking them out.

CheeseGuardian

Get a X48/X38 motherboard, then. P35/P45 boards don't have two x16 PCIE slots, so it would somewhat limit performance in crossfire. X48/38 are significantly more expensive, tho, so you might have to sacrifice something to fit it under $1k.

Or you can just say screw it and just buy a P35/45, crossfire is still better than one video card even without the full PCIE bandwidth on both slots.

Added benefit of crossfire over SLI is that you can crossfire different GPUs from the same generation... 4870+4870x2 FTW?

Spore isn't going to be really graphically demanding, and nobody outside blizzard has any idea what kind of video you need to run D3... shouldn't be too crazy tho, knowing blizz. A 8600GT or HD2600 would probably be enough to run those games and most of the newest stuff on decent quality settings.

You'd probably want something around 15 inches, any bigger and it'd look pretty clunky in your classes (and probably be a pain to carry around all the time)....Should cost around $1000-$1200 depending on the extras.

Wow. I can't believe they made a 8400gs with 1 gig of memory.

The 8400gs isn't really a gaming card. It'll play most stuff on the lowest possible settings, but crank up the details and prepare to wait a long time between frames.

We got two EVGA 9600GT SLI to 782/1024 core/mem, but this was on a tech station with air conditioning and lots of fans.

Yeah, you should probably get a new computer if you want to play the latest games. You can get a pretty decent budget gaming computer for easily less than $1000 now.

If you just wanted to get a video card, though, go for something like the 8800gt or hd 3850, which are both very good deals (imo) right now, and both will probably be about the limit of what your system can handle.

Depending on your motherboard, the video cards SLI, and the overall beefyness of the rest of your system, you might get from 10-40% from going SLI.

It's up to you to decide whether or not you think it's worth paying twice as much for a video solution for the modest gains. Keep in mind that with SLI, there are additional power requirements also.

I can tell you right now, that's a great system for school work... as long as your school work doesn't involve heavy encoding, lots of graphics, or tons of calculations. For gaming, on the other hand, it's an OK system. It should be enough to play just about any game on the market today (with the exception of Crysis on Very High) at pretty decent frame rates.

I think the "operating hard drive" is the drive the OS is installed to, and the secondary hard drive is just a big ol storage bin where speed isn't an issue. The operation/storage drive configuration is getting really popular because fast hard drives usually have lower capacity and cost a lot more. Big hard drives are usually somewhat slower (though the difference is usually marginal), but have a much better cost per GB.

You don't really need two Raptors in RAID 0 for gaming unless loadtimes are a big deal to you... but then you'd probably want a more powerful CPU too.