Gf3 Ti500 vs Radeon 8500...which to buy?

[LordDarkHelmet]

Hey, it's time for another episode of beat up on the newbie! Yay, my favorite game. Except this time I'M the newbie...not so fun on this side. Anyway, here's my deal; I'm building a new system from scratch, here's what I've got so far:

Athlon 1800+ XP
Epox EP-8KHA+
IBM 60GB 60GXP 7200rpm Ultra ATA
1 512mb stick of Mushkin PC2100
Creative Labs Soundblaster Live 5.1
NetGear ethernet
Sony DVD-ROM 16x/40x
LaCie external firewire CD-RW 16x/10x/32x (or something like that)
Blah blah blah, you don't need my whole life story. ANYWAY, I'm going to be getting the graphics card in a while, probably in early February or maybe even late January if all goes well. What I need to know though, is should I get the GeForce3 Ti500 or the Radeon 8500? I'm utterly stuck on this issue.
Nvidia is more respected and known for being able to push their stuff to the max, and ATI's notorious for bad drivers, but the newest drivers for the 8500 made it just about equal with the Ti500 - in fact it surpassed the Gf3 on 1600x1200 resolutions in some games, and also when running 2x or 4xAA, and looked better too (of course you all know this...::continues beating a dead horse:
But I've heard a lot of complaints about incompatibility and seen several messages about people who got 8500s and returned them for Gf3's. So, basically:
Pro: The Gf3 does a lot better in UT, which is currently my primary game.
Con: The Gf3 costs approximately $130 more than the Radeon 8500 - when they're so close, is that worth it!?
Pro: The Gf3 has MUCH better anti-aliasing
Con: The 8500 has MUCH better textures with the random sampling
Etc., etc., etc. Opinions? New/other information/corrections? Please help, this is the last decision I'll need to make for this computer and I want to get it behind me! Thanks in advance to all those who reply in a *useful* manner.

-Lord Dark Helmet

P.S. Is there any truth to the rumour that the Gf4 will come out in Feb? Because if that's likely I'll probably get like a $42 Gf2 MX for now and then get a Gf4 when it comes out, since it should cream everything else's ass to Hell and back.

 

[LordDarkHelmet]

BTW, just in case anyone was curious, I'm planning on getting the VisionTek Xtasy 6964 if I do go with the Gf3 Ti500. And I plan on running XP (obviously...)

-LDH

 

[LordDarkHelmet]

Another point I'm seeing a lot; the Ti200 can be overclocked to perform damn close to the Ti500? Interesting, but how safe and stable is it? I'm not looking to burn anything out, that's an incredibly stupid waste of money. And how well can a Ti500 be overclocked, comparably?

-LDH (Kick the newbie!)
(Great, now I've had to reply twice to my own post...doesn't this just look damn classy? Stupid no foul language filter combined with no editing twice limit...blah)

 

[DJediMaster]

I just purchased a radeon 8500 a week ago. The main reason i went with the radeon was because it offered anisotropic filtering w/o a larage performance hit. fsaa on the radeon looks a lot better than on the GF3! In addition, the radeon is more future proof I run UT at 1024x768x32 with 2x FSAA and S3TC textures. My average fps for that game is approx 50 fps. I'm running on a t-bird 850 so i'm sure you will get much higher fps than me. I picked up the retail board for approx 360 canadian. If you read over at the rage3d board, there is a way which you can get a radeon LE up to retail speeds with a pencil trick. Good luck on your decision.

btw. i had no probs with the 6006 drivers for xp.