Well, here's something from my personal experience.
 
I purhcased the X800 Pro when it first arrived, all $420(USD) worth
 
Yes it's a very fast card however, given the fact that you can now purchase an X700 Pro from CompUSA for only $200 (AGP or PCIe) and not really notice a performance drop, then I would recommend that one as a very good buy
 
The reason I say this is because I recently upgraded another one of my boxes which had a tired old nVidia GeForce 4-4600. It was fine for some things but really showed it's age with pretty much any new game title
 
I was thinking of keeping it nVidia based but I looked around at the 6600 GT cards and pretty much most of them were going for $50 more then the X700 and all the ones I looked at only had 128MB of frame buffer instead of the 256MB on the ATi graphics card.
 
I think the only reason to go with a higher end card at this time is purely for frame rates and bragging rights

I want to be able to play current games @ high settings and future games @ medium to high settings. i upgrade about every 1 1/2 to 2 years. my 9800pro can only display medium to low settings on games such as farcry, half-life 2, etc. is this about normal? so will the x800xl (or x700 for that matter) give me the next 2 years on at least medium settings?? thanx for the predictions.

Have you tried upgrading to the latest Catalyst v5.6 drivers yet ?!?
 
I would also recommend up[censored] to the latest chipset drivers for your motherboards chipset, Intel/Via/SiS etc...
 
That seems rather low to me for HL2 anyways. As for the other games, not sure. I've not installed Doom3 yet and I don't own Far Cry

i have the latest catalyst drivers now, things r looking better now. far cry is still low though (i think 1 gig of memory would help that). does ne one know when the next card for ati comes out (so the current cards x800, x850 come down in price)??