I don't know if I qualify with my lame reasoning.
Two things:
- I always had nVidia cards. I only owned one ATI, a mobility one, in my laptop. It's just a HD3650 which slows down from heat, and not powerful compared to a normal deskop GPU.
I like to try ATI, but never got the money for a modern one. By modern I mean, one that you can use to try it's performance, the rendering, ease-of-use, etc. - Back then, I played a lot with Linux. One thing I learnt, is that ATI/AMD got a catastrophic support there. Things are changing (radeon/radeonHD). I'd like to try out these 'methods', help with the Ubuntu PPAs or just gain knowledge. If there is a question about nVidia, I know the answer, since I used it for a while. Things are not changing that fast, the installer is the same, you can pass the same arguments, use dkms, etc.
So mainly, I'd like to request a card (ATI 5870 if possible), mainly to experiment, learn.
(Why the 5870? I play with games sometimes, like Battlefield 3. So a low/mid class card would be a bit of a step backwards (like having an FPS lag all the time) if I would have to trade the Zotac card.)