I've seen great results with the MSI X1300 Pro recently bought from newegg at just under $80-. You can find some good models for under the $100- price tag easy enough without having the fastest core speed or the most pipelines and still see good results. On many occasions the hype sells the higher end cards that are also high priced being the newest model out. I heard some good reports from those using the ATI X850 for Half Life 2 and others games.
Finding the right combination of hardwares and softwares on a system usually sees the best results. Some boards work better with ATI cards while others depend on NVidia for that. People seeing Catalyst problems would want to look over NVidia driven models there. Reviews are often based on OC results. On the last board here I ran without the Cat for the Control Panel option on an older update for the ATI card. The Radeon 9550 256mb AGP card was proceeded by two different NVidia driven cards, one by Asus in use in another case and a 128mb MSI model still around here somewhere. If you have a certain model card chosen try running a search at shopping.com, nextag, dealtime, or another engine that will list and compare prices at various vendors. You find a better deal at another vendor. There are also other brands to go throgh just at newegg.