^^
what he said don't bother with the GTX240 and if you want the latest games and high settings the 4850 is more likely to give you that then the 9800GT, I spent a little more and got the 4870 512mb which on average is supposed to give a 15% boost over the 4850 however it was about £50($75) more but I don't plan to upgrade for a while so I thought why not get as much as a I can for my budget now.
Anyway the 4850 should play everything, apart from Crysis of course...(fail engine) on high settings really well. Another reason for choosing the ATI card is that for now anyway, especially in the 8800GT and 9800GT(not sure about GTX 260), the nvidia cards can't handle AA so well so it's causes more lag when you turn it up with them.
HOWEVER, if you can push your budget to get a GTX 260 I would consider it as new games coming out next year may be starting to use physX, now nVidia cards(the new ones) have the ability to use physX well as the compatibility is hard-wired into them, like they have the ability of a separate physX card. ATI's don't which means if you buy a game using physX(which will be shooters at first, not all 2009 shooters but a small number will, I know the PC version of Mirrors edge is using it and the difference is amazing, you get hanging flags which react to were you should them, waving in in the breeze way realistically and glass smashing looks a lot more realistic.
If you have an ATI card the physX processing will be loaded on the CPU more, if you have a good QUAD core or something that probably wouldn't make it so bad but you'd get better FPS if you had a good nVidia card, or so they say.
However if like me you have a good ATI card already you get buy a cheap nvidia card, anything in the 8000 series will do, 8600GT recommended to be your physX card. With the nvidia control panel you can tell that card to process only the physX for you, so if you have two PCI-e x16 slots on your mobo that's an alternative, although by 2010(when more games use it if it catches on) I'll probably get a better GPU anyway.
...whew that was an essay. Basically in conclusion get a 4850, if you have the budget for a GTX 260 though, think about that too, but the price difference is pretty large GTX 260 costs £200 here which I bet is like $280-300 for you where as 4850 should be more like $200 maybe a little less.
actually found the 4870 cards for your price range, newegg has a few but here is an example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131117
comes with a custom heat sink too which will help temperatures. However a tip for you, most new cards run very hot. For the ATI ones the solution is to download the latest drivers and with them comes the ability to manually increase fan speed using CCC(catalyst control centre) you get a cool slider bar, I have mine at 40% when gaming, you don't hear it when you start gaming and it keeps my temps below 55c(although RTS games aint so intensive I guess as shooters). When browsing I turn it down to 22-25% then it's silent, still a whole lot quieter then an xbox 360.
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