Upgrade Advice - GTX 280 Now; Want Moderate Imrpovement + Cooler

[guptasa1]

Just an update the 560ti is in and working great! This card is not as long as my 280, as well as much quieter and MUCH cooler - I ran the same test (actually, longer) with Arkham (max settings, including physics; settled on 4X MSAA as it can do higher easily, but I like smooth + sharp, and 4X looks about as good to my eyes and gives me a higher level of butter smoothness than, say 16Q did [though it did 16Q without a complaint - it just wasn't at quite as consistently high a framerate]). I ran the benchmark (with background programs running even) and got minimum 39 FPS, average 57 FPS, so I'm very happy with that. So this is quite an improvement, and I'm very happy. =) Should play anything I throw at it (as I have a backlog of games a few years old) smoothly and cooly while handling the current crop fairly well (and probably about as good as this system is capable of).

I have to give some props to msi on their great fan/heatsink design (XFX and a few other [Gigabyte?] manufacturers have some similar dual fan coolers) - it's pretty impressive looking/feeling in person; very solid. I'd definitely recommend for anyone investing in either a Radeon or GeForce card to look for a high quality cooler option (often on a factory overclocked card with some extra headroom to boot) - I don't think I'll ever go back to a reference design after this experience.

Thanks much for everyone who provided suggestions and pointed me to the right cards to look at!