I'd say go for a Radeon 5770 ... See http://vishaldoshi.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/in-the-market-for-a-new-mainstream-graphics-card/[^]

I've found that using only constructors is the most recommended appraoch (RAII - Resource Acquisition is Initialization). However, there are cases when you need Init() for instance if you want to construct some bits in one thread and some bits in another thread. Another example is a File object. File->Open() is really the init operation. The file object could be created with no attached file... The solutions I've used are: 1) Try as far as possible to always initialize fully in the constructor 2) When it is not possible -> Create a factory. For example: class FileFactory { FileFactory(string sDirectory); File CreateFile(string Filename) } which allows you to ensure that File objects are always fully initialised. 3) When neither approach is possible - or you create a FactoryFactoryFactory :) - create an Init() method - but then make sure that all class methods "check" that the object is in the correc state and throw if not. This makes the classes brittle - but - means that people forgetting to call Init() will atleast generate meaningfull error messages. -Vishal