Ed Kolis said:
"PCI Express x16 is fancy and new? Hmm, funny, I have like a 3 year old machine with one of those... 
Unless you're talking about PCI Express 2.0 x16... that's apparently something different which I'm not familiar with 
"
PCI-E 1.0 and 2.0 are electrically backwards and forwards compatible, as will be 3.0 whenever it comes out. They tried to design the standard to be long-lasting, and able to evolve over time (unlike ISA, IDE, PCI, etc.). The only difference is that PCI-E 2.0 devices in 2.0 slots can run faster, with greater bandwidth.
PvK said:
"Eh, but the Geforce 8000+ series cards all have features which are for Vista only, not to mention the Vista sabotage features. So for those of us who have no intention of running Vista, the GeForce cards to consider are still the 7000-series. No?"
Vista sabotage features??? Rampant paranoia much? Nvidia and ATI (AMD) have absolutely no incentive to "sabotage" anything; no amount of money from MS would convince them otherwise, since they would lose so much more money from poor sales when word got out...
The 8xxx series cards are a lot faster than 7xxx, and 9xxx will be a lot faster still. 8xxx and 9xxx support DX10, yes, but they still do DX9 a lot faster than the 7xxx cards.
Narf:
The greatest consideration is how much money you want to spend. There are so many f*ing cards now that you can spend as little as $60, on up to $600 or more (not to mention retarded SLI setups). People thought that MS' efforts at market segmentation with Office and Vista were bad, just look at what Nvidia and ATI do...