GIGABYTE ATI Radeon HD5830 1 GB DDR5 2DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort PCI-Express Video Card GV-R583UD-1GD

I'm running two of these in a linux box (Scientific Linux 6) and am having absolutely no problems with them. They just run X, no games or anything and, yes, on the date I write this the 5830 is yesterday's tech. However, given the price of these versus a 6990, these give a little more GPGPU crank per dollar. I'm running OpenCL accessed via python (pyopencl). I switched from CUDA to openCL because openCL is, well, -open- and runs on more hardware. I also wanted to fiddle with ATI/AMD Radeon cards because I wanted to build a bitcoin miner. Nvidia cards can mine bitcoin, but a more or less equivalent radeon can mine about 5x as fast. It's probably because the available programs were optimized by folks running radeons. I doubt I'll be the one to optimize for nvidia though.

If you made it this far you know what you want this is a great card for the price that will play all but the newest (2012) games at perfect frame rate.

If you plan ever to have more than one monitor, don't buy this card. Once you add the second monitor, you will experience flickering and tearing. ATI has not solved the problem after a couple years. I doubt they will any time soon.