I would appreciate some advice on a good video card for a photo editing workstation. The most demanding applications I use are Nikon Capture NX for RAW photo conversion, Photoshop CS3 for other photo editing tasks and other photo editing software. During the editing process, the files can be as large as 200 to 500 MB and require a fair amount of processing power and memory. Image quality is critical.

I will be using an Asus P5K-E mobo with an Intel Quad Core processor. I have no interest in gaming.

Thanks for any advice you can provide.

well any graphics card would do... i would buy something around the 100 pound mark, then use the rest of your money on RAM which will make far more of an impact than a faster graphics card.

For $100, you can easily go with the 8600GT or the 2600XT.

I've heard that ATI has a better looking picture where Nvidia has more raw performance. Something not noticeable to most people, but since you are doing photo editing, it might make quite a difference. Anybody is free to correct me, as I have only heard this by word of mouth.

yeah, but for photoshop it really doesnt matter if you go for Nvidia or ATI, because if your editing photos, you are going to play around with all the colour settings anyway to try and get your screen to match your printer as closely as possible for best colour reproduction, so it really doesnt matter.

Thanks for the advice.

Flakes: yes, I will be profiling my monitor with a Pantone Eye-One device and also color profiling my photo printer. Does this make the question of Nvidia vs ATI less important or more important?

Thanks again.

8400GS cheap and very cheerful.

you want a card with DVI and maybe even dual DVI