So, I'm looking into building a desktop. I'm currently stuck on choosing a graphics card setup that will work to suit my needs, everything else I'm pretty much happy with.

I'm currently looking at two of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130571

I want a good card or two cards, for under $400, that would work for gaming and rendering. Any help would be appreciated. If there's a better / cheaper setup, I'd love to know about it.

Also, how would a 2 gb card compare to 2 1-gb cards? Is there an advantage towards putting them in parallel over using a single high-end card?

I would think it would be more efficient and cheaper to go with two decent cards instead of one top of the line card. Putting the strain on two cards is better than overloading a single card, although you'd have to be sure to get enough power to them as well as figure out an efficient cooling system.

I'm not wanting "I think"'s, though. I'm currently looking at getting two of the cards above and want to know if there's a setup that is better at the same cost or less.

I'd recommend www.tomshardware.com as a resource for video card reviews and comparisons. It depends on what software and games you're planning on using. Newer games and software will benefit most from SLI. I'd be inclined to buy 1 decent card and then in 6months when the price of the card has dropped buy another and configure the two with SLI.

Heh, I'm not looking to run Crysis at max or anything I just want something that lets me play Portal 2, Half-Life 2, and most modern games without any issues.

I've looked on tomshardware, but the issue is that they don't address a single high end vs two lower-end cards in SLI/Xfire configuration, unless I've overlooked something (which is a possibility).

There's an article regarding the best graphics card for your money here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fas ... ,3067.html
However for your $400 budget I doubt you'd have any problems playing many games.

for around the $400 mark follow the following link. they cover both, single and Crossfire/SLI configurations. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fas ... 067-5.html

Radeon HD3870X2 1GB

It runs high spec games at medium quality perfectly, so mid spec games would be a doddle, its cheap too.