best graphics card for opengl

[tiger_tim]

A little poser for people: what would you suggest to a fairly poor student, who is about to embark on developing a project in opengl programming?
Some of this is doing research onto the 3d applications and games that are currently on the market (or is that an excuse to buy a few new games??), so it will have to handle that.
From researching on a few sites it looks like my best option is to buy a GeForce 6600 GT...
What do you think? can we get a big debate going on?

[parallax]

I am no expert in OpenGL...not even close to being a "newbie". But relative to the nVidia 6600GT boards (I have 2 from XFX), for the very reasonable price, they churn out great performance. They overclock awesomely (mine are set at 575MHz/1.13GHz). :cool:

And with a Zalman VGA cooler, the boards run 42-45 deg C no load/load.