I'd be inclined to go with the 8600GT,
though personally I'd look for one with a good
warranty. I'm not sure if XFX/EVGA/BFG
offers a lifetime warranty on any of
their 8600GT models, check the model number
and retailer status and the warranty fine print.
If you do much computationally
heavy (slow) processing in photoshop, it's
not inconceivable that there may eventually
(or maybe presently? ) be some
GPU accellerated options for making it run
faster depending on what GPU model you
have.
If that were the case, I can say that
the 8600GT is the minimum model you'd want
from NVIDIA. My 8800GTX is performing
about 10x faster than my 8600GT, though,
for certain things, but it'd be irrelevant
if you're not doing many slow operations
that the GPU can speed up via Photoshop
GPU enhancements.
If you want ATI, and if they were to
have similar photo processing
enhancements for ATI GPUs, of course
you'd want to select a model of theirs
with competent performance if that's of
concern for your use cases. I'd guess that
one of the 2600's or the 3850 might be
in the right category of capability
and performance for that, but I'm not an
ATI expert.
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