9700 part II...

I read in Maximum pc that soon the 9700 was going to get a ram boost to 256 meg (DDR on the double would really rock). And of course Nvidea will release their next gen chip by Christmas which will surpass the 9700 in its current configuration...

Maybe for a professional board, but I can't see why they'd release a 256 MB consumer board so soon. There's no competition with the 128 MB 9700 as it is. A doubling of the ram would just unnecessarily increase the cost.

I don't doubt that some Doom3 engine based games will suck up the RAM and ask for more, but we're quite a ways off from that.

Now if ATI can release 256 MB boards and retain their current pricepoint; I'm all for it.