need gpu advice

[DrPop]

@GregK - Hi man, long time! So glad to hear you have work lined up. That is VERY important, crunching is a distant second there.
If you're looking at the nVidia cards, I would look at Ebay and either go with a GTX 460 for around $100, or if you can swing it, a GTX 560 Ti version, they are routinely on Ebay for around $180 or so these days. Don't worry about not having 2GB of RAM on the GPU - that isn't going to make much of a difference. It's the amount of shader cores that will speed things up, and the 560 Ti version has more.

Hope things continue on the right path there!
Pop

[Mike029]

Welcome back Greg! Glad to hear your back to work.
That GPU will do well on crunching and games. You'll be throwing some nice stones around soon enough. Hope all is well with the family? All is good here. Just running a stomp with TeaM so jump in if you got a spare core or two.