video card for 3d/2d graphics? I'll be using 3DS Max 8 and Maya 7 as well as Photoshop.

I work professionally in Maya and Photoshop (as well as some others) and I find no worth-while benefit to purchasing a real "openGL" workstation card. Especially in 3dsMax, with its integrated directX previews. Buy the Nvidia GeForce 7800GTX 256MB. You'd be wasting your money to get the 512MB one unless you're going to be running resolutions higher than 1920x1200 or two monitors of that res.If you find that you really need the workstation card - there are actually a few cases where it's necessary in Maya with many kinds of hardware-rendered particles - then you can always hack your card into a Quadro - but I'm not going to say any more about that...