BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB
The 500 to 600 hundred dollar video cards on the market are typically more for bragging rights then they are mass consumption. Once they get down to the $300 range, you see a lot more adoption from both the PC gaming and HTPC enthusiast crowd. If widescreen gaming is part of your HTPC duty, you will want something along this price range.
A couple of things we hope to find out in the near future are: 1. Will DX10 affect media performance/quality at all. 2. Does the 8800 series have hardware assisted playback for the next-gen CODECS.
Most of the reviews you will see today will focus primarily on gaming. Hopefully we can get you more information on media performance.
From the article: (Hardocp review)
This is very exciting in two major ways; number one, the specifications being the same means it should deliver the exact same shader performance in your games. The memory size difference though will mean that at some higher resolutions you may see a performance difference and you may have to back off on some antialiasing settings. The raw shader performance, raw ROP performance, and raw memory bandwidth though will be exactly the same.