I WANT A FRIGGIN GTX295!!!

I'm an engineer, not a game player, damnit! My current machine has a
humble yet lovable FX5900 agp4x in it and I'm ready to build a new
workstation based on the WestmereEP 6 core CPUs.

The specs I've read about the consumer oriented nvidia cards (wikipedia)
show that the vertex and texture generation speeds of the gtx295 are as
good as (or better than) the new (EXPENSIVE!) 480 cards. Thing is, not a
single vendor in the US seems to have the 295 anymore. WTF?!

Someone suggested that the ATI 5870 might be a good alternative but I
almost exclusively do openGL stuff in Linux and I have heard BAD THINGS
about linux support for the ATI cards.

what I want:

1) lots of vertex/pixel computation firepower
2) decent texture performance
3) efficient support for shared memory x11/xover infrastructure in the
driver
4) hardware support for a VESA level framebuffer driver (for
compatibility with older CAD/CAM applications)

Things I couldn't care less about:
1) SLI (not enough room in my machine requires too much power)
2) fancy antialiasing, shaders, or photo-realism enhancements

Thoughts?