John writes, "I was thinking of getting the GeForce GTX 280 series of video cards, but then I saw the QuadroFX 5800 series of cards and began to wonder: is the GTX 280 really the best there is when it comes to video cards?"

Well hold your horses. Before you go out and spend $3,000 on a graphics card (yes, that's the price of one card) you should know that the QuadroFX series of cards is not meant for gaming. While the price is higher and the specs are better than the GTX line of cards, the QuadroFX series is made for professionals to get their work done, including modeling, textures, data rendering (such as graphs), video rendering, and so on.

The primary difference between the GTX and QuadroFX series of cards is that the GTX is made to render a bunch of polygons on screen as quickly as possible, while the QuadroFX is made to interpret data as quickly as possible. In many ways, the QuadroFX is like having another CPU that specializes in video related calculations (as opposed to video rendering). This key difference means you'll more than likely get worse gaming performance out of a QuadroFX than a GTX system.

With that out of the way, what's the absolute best nVidia card you can get for gaming? That would belong to the BFG GeForce GTX 280 Video Card OC2 Edition. At $455 it's the hands down fastest GTX 280 on the market right now, but there's a caveat: this beast gets hot. While the stock cooling provided by BFG is "just enough" to keep it from melting down, you really need to consider investing in a water cooling solution to use this beast - especially if you're crazy enough to run it in SLI mode.

If you're not looking to spend almost $500, take a look at the BFG GeForce GTX 280 Video Card OCX Edition. It's the exact same card as the OC2, but it hasn't been overclocked. It still gets pretty damn hot, so a water cooling solution might still be in order, but it's only $290 compared to the $455 of its overclocked brother.

Do you have a question you need answered? E-mail me! lordkat@gmail.com

Click here to check out How to Build a Gaming Computer for Under $1000.

Be safe,

Jason