New Video Card...

Back in June 2007 I purchased two Sapphire HD2900 XT's. They cost around $550 a piece at the time, and had about 1 GB of DDR3 memory on them. Fast at the time, and it was probably a bleeding edge video card considering most companies hadn't even put out a DX10 card by then.

Well, usually I replace my video cards on my PC every six months, but this time - well it's been almost one year seven months and I had been having more and more issues with these particular set of video cards. Despite thier enormous power consumtion, they really heated up my PC to amazing temps!

Well, about a year ago in June - the drivers for the 2900's would blue screen when I tried to update them. I called Sapphire Technical Support. Guess what. They NEVER responded. I emailed them. Sent them registered letters. NO RESPONSE! Well, after months of calling them, I finally got through in December. The tech told me that they had gone pretty much out of warranty, could not be upgraded and Sapphire would not trade up for a newer set of video cards.

You know, I rarely buy Sapphire cards - and this is yet ANOTHER reason why I will *never again* purchase thier crappy video cards.

Today my PC suffered some very odd problems - the video screen was blinking out and the whole PC was locking up. At first I thought it was Vista - which has been having so many problems lately, I just chalked it up as another Vista bug. Then I thought it was my Logitech keyboard, because during those lockup sessions, it would stop responding, so I replaced that with my standby unit.

This didn't solve the issue, and I could not log into Vista. When I did, and tried to access my profile, it would lock up, so I thought it was a profile issue.

Finally my video card just up and died. I could hear it in the PC, the fan going up and down and making horrible sounds.

So I removed both ATI cards and used one, then the other to see if they were the culprit.

Imagine my surprise (NOT!) when BOTH cards had issues. One had a fan issue, and one had a bad VDU.

I decided today to go out and get a new video card, something with 1GB of DDR3 memory on it. I picked up a Diamond Multimedia HD 4670 with 1GB of DDR3 memory on it.

I could have gotten the bleeding edge video cards from ATI which would have been the HD4870 1GB x2 package which runs around $545 at Fry's Electronics. It had a $40 rebate on it, but I picked up the 4670 instead for $125 and it actually *outperforms* my older 2900 card by leaps and bounds.

Funny thing is, its lighter, less power to run it, and quieter. I'm still miffed that both my video cards had to take a dump today. That took about 3 hours out of my day to diagnose and figure out the problem was the video cards.

When I got back home from Fry's, I took out the old card, replaced it with the newer one and loaded up the new video drivers. FSX actually performs MUCH better now, and some of my new FPS games work faster, which is nice for a change.