8xxx or 7xxx Nvidia series card?

[videobruce]

The 8800 series is right out of my price range.

Between the 8000 series and the older 7000 series, should I rule out those for the price difference?

The box will be used with a 57" HDTV;
1 VGA & 1 DVI (perfered),
maybe a game or two,
possibly a HD tuner,
used as a 'slide show' for digital cameras pics,
no HD/BlueRay DVDs' yet, or the forseeable future,
but will be at 1920x1080 resolution.

I see many cards have two DVI outs as opposed to one of each. While the DVI would be the one I would use, I like having a VGA (w/ the ATI component adapter, assuming it will work with a nVidea based card) to fall back on.

If you need any other info, please ask.
BTW, I don't overclock and I'm concerned about power comsumption of the card.

[flanzig1]

Could go with an 8600 series video card and still do the things you want. The 8600 series are in the $110 to $200 range.

[Tin]

How much do you want to spend? You could also look into the ATI HD3870...retails for about $220 and sits somewhere in performance between an 8800GTS 320MB and an 8800GT for ~$50 to $100 less.

[Alfie]

I would look at the ATI 3850,affordable,outperforms the Nvidia 8600gt considerably and draws less power.
What power supply do you have,as the newer cards require more.
The cards ship with an adapter to change the dvi port to vga.

[videobruce]

I wanted to stay under $150 or so. One test I saw gave the 8600 series an edge over the 78 & 7900 series with certain HD video applications even though that same card preformed worse that the 7xxx series from TomsHardware tests.

[glc]

Look at the Radeon X1650GT. It's quite a card for the price. I just built a low budget gaming box with it. Tom's likes it.

[videobruce]

This is going to be used on a 57" HDTV and from reading about other experiances, Nvidea seems to have the advantage over ATI at least for getting a 1:1 pixel mapping and custom resolutions and the cards just working better with HDTVs' in general. My current cards are ATI, which at the time were suposely better.

[Lespaul20]

I haven't read or heard that anywhere, where have you? I'm sure both brands have issues with different brands of TVs.