If you're for nVidia, you can't go wrong price to performance-wise with the 7600GT. Everyone seems to recommend them, so I'd assume they're a pretty dang good card. However,
personally, I'd recommend to you (unless you intend on SLI) the seemingly highly underrated Radeon
X850XT. It's cheaper than the 7600GT, and the stats actually look better, to me. The memory is nearly as fast, and it's 256-bit interface makes its bandwidth better, since the 7600GT's memory isn't twice as fast. Now I don't know the history of this card; if there are any problems that people have had with this card, then sure, it may not be worth risking getting a defective card. But this card really seems good to me, even though its number is less that the X1300 or the X1600, it still looks to be better.
I have never built a system or even for that matter seen a system running with either of these cards, I'm just going by sheer stats which were found at the following website.
Here's a comparison of the two cards: the X850XT and the 7600GT. According to GPUreview, its 3DMark05 scores are actually better. Anyone feel free to disagree with me, but this is just what
I would recommend for someone on a bit of a budget, assuming they don't favor either side and aren't necessarily going for SLI.
EDIT: Sorry for the wrong link to the card, I just fixed it (I think).