With the announcement of the AMD-ATI merger, the video card market is in a state of flux. The 7600GS is a good mainstream card, available on Newegg for $129.99 after a $20 mail-in rebate. For this price, you get 512MB of memory; double that of other cards on the mainstream market. This will help with anti-aliasing enabled and in applications like Maya that requires more memory.
EVGA support is second to none in the industry. They have a Lifetime Warranty, 24/7 Toll-free technical support, a Step-Up program make them one of my top choices whenever I recommend a video card on an NVIDIA chipset. The 7600GS comes with a 1+1 warranty. EVGA's 7600GS is an excellent choice for the mainstream market.
If you haven't entered EVGA's new Scavenger Hunt 2006 I would suggest entering it ASAP. Every year EVGA has a Scavenger Hunt where the participants look for Gold Ribbons on EVGA's website. Lots of wonderful prizes, including a dinner with Jen Hsun Huang, the founder of NVIDIA, can be won by simply answering questions and finding the Ribbons. This year there are over $25,000 in prizes including complete SLI systems, copies of Microsoft Office, Windows XP and more.
