I should probably mention that I'm not a hardcore gamer... I didn't need to update my 8500DV until the free version of FEAR came along.  That computer is still crippled with an AGP 4x slot but the x850pro gave me very playable framerates in FEAR.  The 8500 ran Sim City4, UT99 and ut2004 fine and a handful of other games that couldn't hold my interest for more than a few days.  I put a little bit of a priority on having AV jack in/out capabilities on my video card so that influenced my choices too.  The 8500DV even has a firewire jack... would be nice if they still did that IMO but it's not what the majority of the market wants.  I wonder if the on-board sound of this new ATI card will end up being crap compared to a dedicated audigy card or something similar.