Cool. Apparently the required specs put by valve are estimations... so i'm going to wait yet and make sure.

Honestly, if your powersupply can handle a 4850, go for that. I have that on my desktop at home and it works like a champ. I replaced the old x1900xt that I had before and the difference was very noticeable.

If you aren't sure what it is, pop open the case and look at the powersupply.. It should have the watts listed on the PSU on a big sticker and you'll likely see additional plugs that aren't hooked up to anything. (Hopefully). If it is fairly low wattage wise, it's usually not that bad to replace one of those. You can get a decent PSU for around $50 (OCZ makes a good one). Just ask us if you aren't sure exactly what you need and whether the brand is decent or not.

Sometime in the next few months I plan on rebuilding my desktop with a newer processor (have a AMD 4800+ 64 right now) and moherboard so it can handle anything and everything i can throw at it.

And if you can, get Windows 7 in the near future.. It's great.

I recommend a 9600GSO. I got the older version for ~$50 a year ago. It overclocks very well, and runs almost all modern games that I've played on high settings with 4xAA and V-sync. Very good card if you're on a budget. There may be better deals out there for faster cards, but this card should be more than enough for your needs.

This one is $39 after MIR. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121320

You may also want to consider the Radon HD 4770 - they're supposed to perform similarly to 4850s, I believe, only they consume less power and generate less heat due to the 40nm process, as opposed to 55nm which is used by most of the 4000-series video cards.

Yeah, my girlfriend is in a PHD program so we're going to pick up Windows 7 on the cheap.

Vista really doesn't bother me though... other then the excessive RAM demand.

I'm running the 7600 RTM build of Windows 7 on my desktop and it runs like a champ. I really cannot fault it in any way. Vista never annoyed me too much, but the difference between that and 7 is big to me.

Of course, I am a IT professional.

This.

It runs flawlessly on my comp (not that that's a surprise...), but also on my netbook, and my mom's 6-year-old pos Dell with a Pentium 4.  The only problem with the latter was some trouble with the chipset drivers since Intel dropped support for it after XP, but I eventually got it to co-operate.