I hear XFX are pretty good but never used one, PNY are good I've used one of there cards b4 and it can clock great and is very stable, Gainward are also meant to be good, BFG not my favorite card makers due to them bumping clock speeds up by a very very small amount and selling them on for more.
Personally I like BFG. I've seen them competively priced with other comparable cards, they're a U.S. company, and most importantly, LIFETIME WARRANTY. eVGA sucks worse than... Well, I don't have a good analogy handy, but they're pretty crappy cards.
XFX are very good as are ASUS, HiS, BFG, Gainward, Xpert vision ( because i got one ).... as for the best i suppose it's down to the best deal @ the time what does being a U.S company have to do with it ?
btw i was not saying BFG cards suck (i have used 1 b4) am just saying that i've seen them b4 selling cards clocked by like 10mhz for more than a stock one when any1 can do the same as them and clock it more without having to pay extra, lifetime warranty's are always good
I like 3dlabs. Their realizm 800 is a dual core GPU and has 640MB of memory. It should even outperform an fx4400!!! Also their realizm 200 is a great card. It is pretty comperable to the high end nvidia cards, but much cheaper. In terms of nvidia based cards, I get pny. As far as I know they are the only ones that make nvidia's Quadro cards.
I like gigabyte.Have the nvidia 6600gt SLI ready(gigabyte)pcclub.PNY is also good.Had a compUSA employee tell me that the BFG isn't that good.
Not to say anything bad about lifetime warranties but what is the point? If the product doesn't have any moving parts the chances of it failing after the first year is almost nil. Who is going to be using the same parts after 5 years anyway? My vote is Asus, PowerColor and ATI but don't let warranty make your choice as video cards can last 10 years easy because there are no moving parts (fans don't count). I actually have some very old PCI video cards for testing purposes that work great still and I just leave thim in a box (static electricity is a myth ).
Destra, static electricity is not a myth as i took the mandatory esd & card handling courses at celectica with the required 100% pass mark required to work on circuit boards. i worked there for 4yrs 5months on sun microsystems, cisco system boards & nokia telephones.
Normally i make sure am touching my PC case to avoid static as cases are grounded so no static probs. Another thing about warranty's is the manufactures will only replace it if they still make the thing so it's more like a 1-3 year warrant rather than a lifetime