I am trying to decide what type of graphics card to go with and am trying to get what I need and not overspend or underspend. If I play games such as Red Alert 3 and am intending on playing The Sims 3, what type of card would you recommend that will allow me to have great graphics (HIGH or ULTRA HIGH) on these games. I don't believe I will be playing games like Crysis or other games such as that. Also, I am building this so it will most likely be paired with an AMD 9850 Quad-Core and EITHER 4GB or 8GB of DDR2-800 (PC6400) memory on Vista 64-bit.


Thank you in advance.Would assume you will be looking to use a PCI Express graphics card?

I myself, like, Nvidia cards. But that's just me.I am using a PCI Express 2.0 slot.The Nvidia GeForce 9 series graphic cards are PCIE 2.0 compliant.

I would use a ati radeon 4850 or if you can afford it a ati radeon 4870.You will not need a high SPECIFICATION computer to play those games.
Your quad core CPU will more than handle RA3 - it likes multiple cores.
Something like a Geforce 9500GT or Radeon 4670 would be great, maybe even a little overkill.
If you think you might play some more intensive games though I'd recommend a much STRONGER card - the Radeon 4850 offers just about the best performance/cost ratio right now and I personally would find it hard to recommend more unless you're playing some very intensive games.
Your other intended components are quite high-end too - if those games are the most taxing tasks you'll be doing, I'd advise you to downgrade and save some cash. If you're doing somehting else that's quite CPU and RAM intensive though, that CPU and amount of RAM might be necessary.