The R600 has debuted as the Radeon HD 2900 XT, and has so far been surprisingly unimpressive. Power consumption is record breaking and performance nips at the heels of the mid-high end GeForce 8800 GT.

It usually takes at least 6 months before a newly released architecture is actually worth buying into and as long as 12 months before it matures into a cost effective product. The GeForce 8800 GTX came to market November last year and is probably nearing a refresh cycle (these are typically 6-9 months). NVIDIA are likely to hold off on the next until AMD release their true high end card. It's doubtful at this point that AMD will best NVIDIA.

If you were to wait a months or two, you'll probably see a price drop in the GeForce 8800 GTX; a new GeForce 8800 Ultra and maybe GeForce 8800 GS. I very much doubt the Radeon HD 2900 XTX will be competitive. AMD's takeover of ATI seems to have set the Radeon product back. Only when manufacturers are in some sort of trouble will they launch a new architecture without the flagship; ATI never did this. Further more, this is the first month I can recall in 4 years or more that there has not been a new Catalyst driver for the Radeon.

As for the cost, you'll have to price that up yourself. It would be a very big mistake to build a system on a budget and select the graphics card first. Good platform selection gives you a solid base on which to build the system up; selecting a cheap motherboard to host a GeForce 8800 GTX would be like parking a articulated truck on the beach. On the other hand, with a good motherboard and power supply unit, you'll have a nice stable system and can upgrade later. I understand that it's very tempting to weigh hardware by what it will contribute to frame rate. There's no point deciding to cut costs on a critical component because you'll only loose 5 fps, when the result is an unstable system and hardware failure in less than 12 months. Of course, you don't want to buy into excessively expensive hardware that will only gain you 5 fps.

If you can't afford the platform to run the flagship graphics card, then you need to face reality and get a more affordable one.