I am building a dual-boot machine to run windows and mandrake. If it was a purely windows machine, I would get the ati radeon 9600xt 128mg card, but since I plan on dual-booting I am not sure anymore. I have heard that nvidia cards work better under linux, is that true? Do any of you already have a setup similar to mine? I would like to get a 128mg card because it will perfrom enough to play all my games but it is still cheap enough to be in my budget. Thanks for all your advice in advance, Daniel

I am not set totally on 128mgs for the card but I would like to get the best ratio of price quality and funtionality between systems as possible

Well, I had Ati Radeon 9100 before, and no matter how i tried to get the ATI drivers to work, I couldn't get even Unreal 1 to work well. (The screen was a "sqere-puzzle"). I bought Geforce FX5200 today (yep, not the best but usable..) and no problem. Personally I suggest nVIDIA card. (And if you surf this forum enough, You'll see that I'm not the onlyone seen the difference.) Ati is good, But the drivers provided suck..

thanks for the input
do you have any advice on which one to get?

For good game performance at a low price pick at least an GeForceFX 5700 Ultra. Do not use LE cards because they are a waste of money because you have to overclock them about 200% to reach Ultra speeds which is a fantasy even with a lot of cooling techniques for video cards. For GeForceFX 5700 Ultra compare the memory speed between the brands. A lot of people do not know that companies like to go cheap on 256 MB models, so the 256 MB models will look more appetizing than the 128 MB models. This means check the memory bus and GPU speed for the video card. You can push to GeForce6 6600, but some people are having problems with these cards. Though I do not know your budget.

ATI is not supporting Linux very well for their video cards. There is no TV out, no DVI, no video capture feature in their drivers, so its worthless to buy ATI video cards for Linux.

Stay away from VIVO cards or cards that bundles a video capture chip from either manufacture because they use different programming for the video capture chip. nVidia supports its TwinView technology, DVI, and TV out in Linux.

Yep, make sure to go with nvidia, if you have about 200 bucks, the 6600gt looks pretty good. I hear it bests a 9800 xt in most areas, I want one myself

By the way, I've never actually tried to overclock any videocards. I basically know how it goes in Win, but Linux? Anyone done that? Say, my FX5200: How to overclock it, what should be remembered?
(UT2004 looks pretty good with it allready, but just to think about overclocking makes that little "wanna-be-a-guru-somedays" - devil take over me..)

I've never gotten unreal 2k3 to install, but I've had a game using the unreal engine to install, performance with my 9800XT was fine, and my drivers are installed correctly.