I am hearing a lot of rumours about the Radeon HD870, which will be a .40nm DX 11 card possibly with up to 1280 shaders (up from 800 with the current gen), and the rumours are saying July announcement.

I think this is credible, and will be about the same time as the 800 series AMD chipset.


If you wanted to buy right now on the budget discussed above i'd get the following:
AMD PII 945 socketAM3 - 180 GBP
AMD 790GX m/b - 110 GBP
nVidia 275 GTX - 270 GBP

If you were buying in August i would suggest:
AMD PII 955 socketAM3 - 180 GBP
AMD 800 series m/b - 150 GBP
AMD HD870 series GPU - 270 GBP