yeah I'm in kind of a narrow niche in terms of my options, and tbh this isn't a "need" upgrade, this is more a target of opportunity due to the time of year and sales and wifely patience. I'll have to look at what my performance is with all 4 windows cranking. I also doubt I can get into the 1GB flavors of 9800 GT for the budget window I'm looking at.

Discarding the system memory limitation, I assume I'll see a real improvement going from an 8600 GT with 256 to a 9800 GT with 512?

Also had a thought earlier today, I run with 1 big and 3 small windows, with the affinity split between both cores. Wonder if I'd get an increase moving all 3 slaves to one core and leaving the main solo on core ).

To 5 box (or especially to 5 box in LK) I'll have to play my main on my secondary single core box and monitor and the 4 slaves on the dual core with big monitor. Or go to a beastly machine, which won't be well received.