Question about gaming graphics cards and workstation applitcations/CUDA vs Stream

I am quickly finding myself caring less and less about gaming (I haven't gamed at all in about two weeks, and the last time was only for about an hour), and I am more interested in raw power for experimenting and tweaking around with various things. I want to have a powerful machine for powerful tasks, like video rendering and photo editing, not that I do any of these things, but I might. I am currently reading "Operating System Concepts 7th Editon", and once I am through I will start "C coding for dummies" or something similar. I want my programs to run on the best hardware I can.

I have a two HD 4850 that will likely be coming back very soon from my RMA, and I will be going back to crossfire then. However, I am musing with the idea of trading for a set of nvidia cards (9800gt or higher probably) possibly sometime down the road. I want to know which cards work better at workstation apps.

I am also extremely interested in firestream and CUDA. I know that CUDA can be coded with simple C, but I don't know if it is quite so easy to do so with firestream. I was wondering which is overall better, or what the main features of each are.

Links to benchmarks would be great

Well, Google will find you plenty of benchmarks.

Don't worry about GPGPU, though, for now. You won't be able to write GPGPU code at least for a year or two after you start learning to program. By that time all those cards will be obsolete anyways.

The hardware is not really that important for programming. A P3 will do (assuming you don't want to wait those extra few seconds when compiling programs). Knowledge and experience are the hard things to get. Hardware is just money.

For workstation graphics you might want to look into Nvidia's Quadro series cards. They are normally intended for workstations and often have multiple GPU's on the same card. They are not cheap and I'm unfamiliar with them so I cannot offer any more advice.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/qfx_uhe.html

Spec and benchmarks of the Quadro cards:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11761.html

Hm... I think I am going to stick with my currrent hardware and wait until OpenCL comes out. I am trading my dual core for a lower clocked quad, and that will be find for now. Thanks :)