It's unfortunate that some will just look at the newest/biggest specs and assume it's best for all set ups.

1GB of VRAM is enough for virtually any game at up to 1920x1200.

The main advantage of more VRAM comes with higher resolutions (2x 1680x1050, 2560x1600 for example) when the additional VRAM can actually become a requirement with texture heavy games at those resolutions.

More VRAM just means more texture data can be buffered and loaded. As you said, it's the bandwidth of that memory that determines the speed at which texture data is buffered and loaded.

i am waiting after october to build mine.
seriously after vista fiasco it's better to wait abit after 7 released and drivers are more mature.
i already bought some games for cheap =).

I have:
8400 (overclocked to 4gig on air)
4 gig of ddr 2
4850 1 gig (i would get a 4890 if building now)
asus p5q-se (i would get a motherboard with sli/x-fire capabilities)
22" lcd
1tb hard drive

This is enough to run crysis on 1920 X 1080 with everything high with no slowdowns.

I would look @ getting a intel/amd quadcore, however i don't know if you would need ddr 3 as yet.

You could also wait until dx11 cards come out.

what PSU do you have?

I now have:

i7 930

6 gig ddr3

3 tb hdd

1 x 5850

1 x gt 250 (for phsyx)

700w psu

This runs everything on high :)

How the fuck did you pull that one off? You can't run more than 1 graphics processor, that includes the itnegrated one too, at the same time unless they are in SLI or Crossfire. From what I can tell, one of your cards is not working at all and you wasted your money on it. I would venture to guess it's the gt250 that's running if you can see the PhysX and stuff and the 5850 is just kind of chilling there. However if you have found a way to have 2 graphical processors without SLI/Xfire you gotta let me know how.

the best graphis card for your money i think is the gtx 460