Stuck in the Middle

[bnolsen]

I'd probably suggest the 3870 & 4gb ram.

3870 is good performance with lower idle power usage.
4GB ram is very cheap for now and linux runs super awesome with 2GB on 64bit.

[d2kx]

Yesterday I for the first time had the chance to do some testing on a higher-end nVidia card (8800 GTX). The 2D Compiz performance with Ubuntu 8.04.1 was not as good as it is on my ATi (Radeon X1900 XT 512) system, but Videos worked without flickering. Also, the KDE4 performance with KDE 4.1 RC1 was horrible. From an objective point of view, I'd go with the AMD Radeon HD 3870 or 4850.

[Kano]

You are no nvidia user, so if you really need to use KDE 4 then install latest beta - you can use my script for that (even in live mode):

http://kanotix.com/files/install-nvidia-debian.sh

Then do:

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1

This should be much faster with KDE 4. It would be easy to load nvidia settings it at kde startup:

echo nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1 > .kde/Autostart/nvidia.sh
chmod +x .kde/Autostart/nvidia.sh