[dulipishi]

Hi:

I am thinking of buying a 30" apple cinema display for my Macbook pro.
However, I would also like to connect my home built PC to the cinema display.
The problem is that my graphics card is a ATI 9800 XT Pro which does not have
dual-link DVI to drive the 30". So I need to upgrade the card anyway.

My PC running windows has been a good boy so far - 3.0 GhZ Intel Pentium 4
with 1GB memory and an AGP slot. Since I need a dual link DVI out card, I think
I need to upgrade the motherboard to PCI express (all dual link DVI cards seem to be PCI express). I was hoping to just transfer the CPU
to the new motherboard or getting a new CPU. I want a graphics card that can run games like HL2 and HL2 episode one
smoothly on the 30", same for the latest games.

What motherboard would you recommend ? What graphics card ?

I want to be able to play the latest games and run Vista smoothly.

How much would an ATI Radeon 9800 XT pro be worth nowadays if I sell it ?

Thanks

[Gossamer]

I've got some limited experience building my own computers. I got an MSI motherboard, and it was a bit bare bones, features were locked, the PCI express slot only supports certain graphics cards, and I had to RMA it for a bad SATA controller, which took 24 days.
My roommate got an AMD BioStar, and it seems quite top of the line. The packaging and accessories were top-notch, and the bios has built in overclocking features, so his dual core 2.0 runs stable at 2.5GHz with just a couple easy setting changes. He also got a Radeon X1600Pro, and it runs Doom3 at just under Ultra settings quite well. You can get an X1600pro w/ dual link for $82 after rebate here. If you want even better performance and you're not too worried about the cost, I'd go with the X1900. I don't know much about NVidia, though, and I'm sure they've got some great offerings.
Check around on eBay to see what cards like your current one are selling for to get a good price.