Graphics card recommendation?

[Jack Howarth]

  On two different Fedora 10 x86_64 boxes (one
AMD and the other Intel based) both equipped with
Radeon X1650 Pro graphics cards, the radeon driver
has been a total nightmare. The fglrx drivers
(which we have been using in the past) no longer
are available for pre-HD radeon cards. The free
radeon drivers work well except for one nasty
flaw... spontaneous reboots back to the BIOS
at random times. Disabling the kernel modeset
feature does nothing to eliminate these. We finally
gave up and replaced one of the machine's X1650 Pro
with a Nvidia 8600GT using the non-free nvidia
drivers. The machine has been rock solid ever since
the switch over. I finally gave up on the second
machine and ordered a Nvidia 9600GT for it as well.
  I have tested x86_64 Fedora 11 on a MacBook Pro with
X1600 graphics and found the new DRI2 based radeon
driver to be unusable because of improper rendering
(like drawing black to the top of the screen when
Pymol opens its viewer window or rendering progress
bars up in the menu bar). Google has its work cut
out for them if their OS is based on linux. I hope
they plan to throw a lot of money at driver development
because this issue is frankly killing Linux as a
platform here in our lab. Mac OS X's X11 graphics
support looks rock solid by comparison.
                 Jack