Are you planning on dropping $250 or more on a graphics card any time soon? DON'T!
I'd advise anyone thinking of spending any kind of serious money on a serious high-end graphics card to put off that purchase for a few months and wait. Wait for what?

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Note: You might read what I've written above and think that I'm suggesting that multi-GPU technologies such as SLI and Crossfire are now irrelevant. You'd be right. Not only are the promised benefits of SLI and Crossfire a very hit-and-miss affair at times (with many games you actually initially see a drop in performance on multi-GPU systems, and by the time the drivers are optimized, you're multi-GPU setup is no longer cutting edge), but even when there are gains involved, these are small.
Tread carefully when wading out into multi-GPU waters - these technologies offer the chance to spend a LOT of hard earned cash for very little return.
Another gripe about graphics cards is how rapidly the become obsolete (or at least how rapidly a high-end card is superseded by a new high-end card). If you'd bought say an NVIDIA 8800GTX back in say early 2007, you'd have bought a card that even now is up there with the best and can still run modern games acceptably.
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The sweet spot for GPUs at present is a HD 4870 with 512MB of memory(shop around and you should be able to pick up one of these for under $200) or a NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ with 512MB of memory (you should be able to get one of these for around $160). In both cases, if you shop around you should be able to pick up a free game with your purchase too, which helps sweeten the deal!