again, I'm amazed how much goes on when one is gone for 24 hours.
Just my thoughts on a couple of things - I've owned ATI cards for 7 years now, and have never had a problem with any of my hardware or drivers. Aside from my two 1950 PROs, I think my fav card still has to be my X700 PRO, which even with the stock cooler has handled such fairly extreme OCing on my part, and lived to tell the tale.
Perhaps other users have had issues with some of their older hardware, especially dating to the era of the 2D + 3D graphics adapter era . . . but, from what I recall, every manufacturer had lots of issues with their initial 3D accelerators, nVidia included. Cooling sucked on everyone's cards, and many ran hotter than almighty hell on top of that (IIRC, the coolers on 3DFX cards could quickly burn you, even at idle temps). Everyone has improved over the last 5 years, so much so that hardware failures are rather uncommon; drivers are what you have to worry about, and truth be told, ATI's drivers do indeed tend to be more stable . . . but then again, are we comparing official release drivers to nVidia's countless beta releases?
Honestly, as I've said before, I'm ATI loyal. I've had some bad dealing with nVidia in the past, starting with how they brushed off all of us 3DFX owners and dropped support after the acquisition. Perhaps if I had found nVidia's customer support during that time to be more attentive and caring of customer's concerns, I would've ended up nVidia loyal instead. Not to say, though, that I'd never recommend nVidia hardware to someone, I just won't buy any with my hard-earned cash.
Anyhow, as to the whole debate - the way I see it as of right now, both the 3870x2 and the 9800 GX2 are on par with each other. TBH, I think the only reason nVidia went ahead with the GF9 series was out of pressure to stay one gen ahead of ATI. Although, if such is the case, they'll feel even more pressure before the year is out if ATI's 4000 series rolls out when planned.
I'm truly hoping that the GX2 will offer impressive performance for what it is and that nVidia has been able iron out their SLI a bit more, or else ATI's dual GPU offerings will start to stomp nVidia when the 4000 and 5000 series roll out.
