The memory size is not the determent of how good the card is, 1GB ram on a 88 GT is still crappier then a GTX or a SLI solution with ami's 3780 card.
Most people play on plasma screens that span from 19" to 22" and then 512 mb of ram is enough, when you covered that area you want a fast card, with as many pixelshaders possible with a stable chip in it. The G92 chip is not a better architecture then the g80 is, thats a fact.
As many other people told you already, the 8800 GT or GTX alternativly crossfire/crossfirex with 3780 ( from AMI/Radeon ) is the best buy when you compare performance vs cost.
The new g100 chipsets in the 9800 GTX will be very price, probably close to 1000 dollars, they will be quite abit more powerful then the 8800 and g80 serie but its not worth the money.
What you should have done if you wasn't so stubborn was to buy SLI 8800 GTX, then you could play all comming dx10 games on high/highest ( with some tweaks in crysis as no aa/af since its fucked up in that game ) and in a year you could upgrade to the new g100 serie wich will have dropped in price with 30-40%, and probably will have newer revisions in the production line. Today the hardware is still ahead of the software so holding out and buying the best card money can buy is not worth it since you won't be able to push it to its limits, performance not used is wasted money.
With that said I know you already ordered and bought the lot, but the 8600 is a shite card, you can't play any new dx10 games on it on a standard 19"-22" plasma at 1680x1024 due to it having 256 mb of memory.
Also you will not be able to sell the 8600 since noone will buy it.
they piss all over the 8800's. I wouldn't waste any money on an 8800 at this point in time... just wait.. have patients for 2 reasons - 1. When the new cards are out the 8800's prices will drop alot and 2. the new cards dominate the 8800's in any way possible.
Wait for the new cards coming out
Seems my piece of paint stripper was a wise choice after all given the time frame
