Deciding between one video card or three video cards.?

These days everyone is trying to get the most out of their money. So I am deciding whether to get 3 Nvidia Geforce EVGA 9800GTX 512MB video cards for around $450:

.Chipset Manufacturer: NVIDIA

.Core Clock: 756MHz (X3)

.Stream Processors: 128 Processing Cores (X3)

.Memory Clock: 2246MHz (X3)

.DirectX: DirectX 10 (X3)

.OpenGL: OpenGL 3.0 (X3)



Or just one Nvidia Geforce EVGA GTX 285 FTW Edition 2GB for $450:

.Chipset Manufacturer: NVIDIA

.Core Clock: 702MHz

.Shader Clock: 1584MHz

.Memory Clock: 2448MHz

.DirectX: DirectX 10

.RAMDAC: 400 MHz

If anyone could help me decide which setup will perform better with graphics set high I will be really great full. And also the 9800GTX has open GL 3.0, what is the difference between 2.0 and 3.0?|||Three 9800GTX's will outperform a single GTX 285, theoretically. But since most games do not scale well in performance with multiple cards, you're better off with just a single 285. You'll also have less headaches this way, as applications often have problems working right with multiple GPUs. You'll probably encounter system instability and other strange things, too.



However, there *are* instances where you will see the three 9800GTX's outperforming the GTX 285, especially in multi-GPU optimized applications.



OpenGL is an open source API for developing computer graphics. 3.0 is the third revision of the API, and has a number of technical improvements from 2.0 that you probably don't care about.



So if you're feeling risky and want the power of three graphics cards, go with three 9800GTX's, otherwise stay safe and stick with the 285, which is powerful in itself.|||the 9800 cards are mediocre and depending on your motherboard as to how they will respond,does your motherboard truely use 3 video cards all at 16X? or 2 at 16X 1 AT 8X which is like using a Physx card

in which case the single 285 may actually out perform the pair of 9800's

besides the new technologgy in the 200 series is far better then the 9000 series but then you really want to rock get apair of 8800's GX2

or 295 or 295 GX2

the quad sli's will WOW you to no end you will have the best of the best