Looking for a gaming card that also works well with Maya.

Hi. I'm not positive this is the right section for this but here goes. A friend of my sister makes a living by rendering graphics for "Second Life" with Maya and selling them to other players for real money. She needs to be able to have Maya open and make graphics, then start Second Life up to see how the new art looks in the game. She keeps getting memory warnings even though she has 2gb and performance is bad. She wants my help putting together a new system that's good for rendering AND gaming for about $2000. That pretty much rules out professional cards so I'm hoping someone knows of a high end gaming card to compliment either a dual or quad conroe that will run Maya without glitches. The compatability list I found was pretty short and I'm hoping someone on these forums has come across something that works. My first thought was an 8800gts but I ran across posts describing worse Maya performance than a 9800 pro. Help please?

The best cards for Maya are the Nvidia quadro fx cards but they are poor for gaming.

I use two geforce 6800 card on my system and it works okay. However, no geforce cards are Maya certified, so you may encounter odd problems on occasion. No gpu's designed for gaming will be optimized for Maya.

Also You will only benifit from a quad core processor in Maya when Batch rendering. If you are running a quad core processor I suggest getting 4 gigs of ram. 2 gigs of ram is easy to go through when rendering with multiple cpus.

I'm not very familiar with Maya and etc, but it's basically a catch-22. The cards that are good for Maya aren't good for gaming. Cards that are good for gaming, aren't good for Maya. So you'll probably be losing something either way.

Only thing I could think of is to run a dual video cards along with dual monitors. Run a Quadro on one monitor for Maya, and a Geforce on the other for gaming. I think that would work pretty well. Would cost a bit extra money though.

She isn't doing movie quality type stuff so it doesn't have to be mind blowingly powerful. She just needs something that will get the job done without taking an eternity or having weird issues that would affect the quality of the final product. Just a good balance really. Compatability is more important than performance.

Well, after more searching I found a professional card list on Wikipedia showing that the same G71 cores are used for 7900 series cards as for some professional grade rendering cards. I'm sure they have other differences but it's reassuring that there are major similarities. I think I'll recommend a 7950gt. Thanks for your help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadro

Good find. Although they use the same core I think the main difference is firmware. There have been other nVidia cards that can be flashed to the Quadro series. I wonder if the 7900's can be flashed to Quadro?

I'm hoping it won't be necessary but I'll post back after she tries it out.
Edit:I found another link with some promising info suggesting 7 series cards should work ok. Check it out.
http://www.barefeats.com/quad04.html