So, i bought a new card 2 years ago which didn't last me even a year before it ****ed up... They sent me a replacement ard in 2008 and told me that apparently this replacement card, although a newer card, only came with a 90 dar warranty as opposed to starting the warranty over (only on this new card rather than continuing the old original one). Now, less than a year into having this second card it is also ****ing up and they refuse to do anything about it... Thus I need a new card.

I know prices have come down a lot so I am hoping I can get on for christmas.. But I need to specify what I want.. So here are my specs:

I have 300 dollars roughly for a gfx card, CANADIAN funds.
I have a 500 watt power supply
I have only two PCI Express ports, so as of right now I am uncertani if I can have one of those cards that plugs into both ports (some require both i guess?), I need a single port card, and I know there are good ones out ther.


Also, because of whats happened with ATI i am refusing to buy from them again, ever. 500 dollars down the drain is a huge chunk to swallow, espcially as a student. That's so much bull**** I don't want to deal with ATI at all... So I would of course, prefer NVIDIA cards (apparently they have a lifetime warranty, I WONDER WHY).

I am gonna try to see if I have a ****ty pci card laying around somewhere.. these lines in the screen are very sickening to stare at and my agp card won't work in this computer

Thanks boys

Also, sorry for the spelling but right now I can only see sporadic areas of my screen.

ATI Radeon 5850 or 5870 are both great cards

Depends on your ATI manufacturer with card quality. I've got an HIS 4870 that's been smoking (good way) since I bought it a year ago. ATI at the moment does have the best cards for your money.

Most videocards don't plug into two PCI-E slots, they plug into one but the gpu heatsink/fan blocks access to the next motherboard PCI/E slot. If you are already using the next slot, like if you have a soundcard or network card installed there, then that is a problem and you will have to stick with a card that only occupies the space of a single slot.

It is a shame you are soured on AMD/ATI, they have several advantages right now like lower power consumption and dx11. It's also tough to make recommendations without knowing a little bit more about your CPU and maximum resolution your monitor supports- but I would look at the GTX260.

This. Just because it's an ATI chipset doesn't mean ATI is at fault. It's usually the manufacturer. And ATI's cards easily beat nVidia right now. I strongly encourage you rethink your decision.

Eh, I'm soured on ATI too thanks to getting a card from them just a couple of months ago, it overheated to the nth degree just idling, they replaced it with one that just flat out died within a week. Luckily my computer store goes out of their way to help their customers, and I swapped it for an NVIDIA.

Perfect example of getting crappy manufacturers. Cooling isn't ATI's fault, it's the manufacturer, they're the ones that design the boards and the cooling placed on it. There's no reason for it to overheat.

Also, I've been burned by "ATI" cards and "nVidia" cards both. My 6800GT was a crashy mess, my old ATI Rage Pro well, need not say more about that one. Yet my nVidia 8800GTS was solid, as is my ATI Radeon 4870. And in the old days, the Radeon 9700 Pro was great, as was my Geforce 3.

If manufacturers are allowed to use the ATI name/brand/image to advertise their cards, ATI should insist that the manufacturers meet some level of quality. You can't hold ATI blameless for shipping chips to crappy manufacturers.

I'm sure they do, actually. But that doesn't change the fact that the same situation happens on both nVidia and ATI.

Well, it's really difficult to be not soured by this experience, especially being a student and dropping 500 bucks on a card that has to be replaced twice. The manufacturer was Sapphire, which I have since heard is the worst of the ATI manufacturer's.... The thing is I totally agree, ATI is really the best bang for your buck. They have some fantastic cards that cost barely anything, but I don't want to drop another chunk of change that I barely have already on something that's going to screw up again in another year, or less.

IMO I think it is better now, considering what has happened, to just suck it up and pay some more dollars at the beginning and have the lifetime warranty (NVidia)

You do know that lifetime warranty isn't always actually lifetime of your life, but the life of the card, right? Make sure you check. Also, you can get the same warranty with ATI cards.

You don't understand. ATI does not make video cards. They sell GPUs to companies who make them. Some companies make both ATi and Nivida cards. Reliability and customer service are dependent on the company who make your card, not the GPU brand.

Never knew that CM and that's very sketchy... Thanks a lot for pointing that one out, I would have defintely not noticed.

Obi, I understand what you're saying. Didn't realise that companies made both. But still, it doesn't help to slap your companie's name onto a product that's being made by a shoddy manufacturer. I would definitely cut all ties with that place unless they met certain criteria before I backed it.

A bad experience can happen with even the best manufacturers. None of them are *that* unreliable, but occasionally people will have bad experiences. You have the same chance of that happening with a Nvidia card. I have a Sapphire card in my PC right now.

I still have my X850 from years ago, works the same as the day I bought it. It's Sapphire too I believe.

The thing that soured me most about the situation is that I replaced the original card sometime near the end of 2008, possibly August or September, that SHOULD have given me a new warranty for the new replacement card, but ths guy I spoke to said it only carried a 90 day warranty.. Whcih doesnt make sense because that sould put BOTH cards shy of the original card's 2 year warranty by a few months...

I have 3 extra X550s.

One thing... I have been reading around and found some stuff that confused me and led me to believe this could be a mobo problem (which i sincerely hope not).

If i install ANY version of my ATI drivers, i immediately get a BSOD and my computer restarts, stuck in this constant loop unless I boot into safe mode, where I can uninstall the drivers. After this, my computer boots up normally, with of course the weird lines all over my screen. They are just multicolored vertical lines that change color whenever I move my mouse or anything on my computer. The lines are there even on my BIOS screen, and loadup screens as well, they never disappear except when of course my computer is off. Windows device manager also is reporting an error code 43 under the video card section of device manager, but everything else appears fine.

This sound like a gfx card issue or a mobo issue?

As far as manufacturers go -- I like eVGA for nVidia and XFX for ATI. XFX usually has a "double lifetime" warranty if you register the card with them, which in their case means warranty for the duration of time YOU own the card plus the duration of the time the NEXT owner (i.e. if you sell it, whoever buys it from you) has the card, which is a good selling point if you decide to sell it later.

That's awesome Pommy. Thanks a lot for the suggestions/help guys, based on what's been said I am probably going to give ATI another try, but this time go with a different manufacturer, possibly XFX based off what Pommy said. The only thing now is to decide whether or not to get a card now, or wait until the 5890 comes out so the 5870 drops in price (currently @ 434 CAD). I bought a 500W PSU for the last card, I don't want to have to buy a 1000W just to support one of the honkin' GeForce cards.

Oh yeah so

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150443&cm_re=5870-_-14-150-443-_-Product

Also
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150438

For whatever reason Newegg doesn't advertise the double lifetime warranty on the .ca site except for for the 4890 (it does on the US site for almost every XFX card) ... dunno if that's because XFX has diff warranty policies in canada or newegg is just lazy

Also I know Tom's isn't the "best" place for product info but I still find these reviews useful:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-310-5970,2491.html

I've had the opposite experience with Sapphire. I'm loving my 4870.

Thanks for the links Pommy. I was thinking about the 5770 to be honest, it seems a decent card and it's only $190 on newegg.ca, not sure how it compares to the 4800 series but the benchmarks I've looked at are impressive so far so I am leaning towards an XFX version of it possibly.

TY Again

Same...my Vapor-X 4890 is great. I had a used VisionTek 4870 that died after a few months and VisionTek doesn't honor the warranty if you're not the original purchaser. My error on that - I should've checked beforehand.

I've yet to hear anything bad about Sapphire...not sure where that came from.

Yea, I'm not sure, Sapphire has a pretty good history of reliable cards. Their warranty and customer service is what usually sucks. How's that Vapor-X cooling? Is it as good as they make it out to be?

So, if you should still have 3 months left on your original warranty, you should call them back and demand to have your card replaced. They can't legally nerf your warranty just because they replace the card -- if the original warranty was 2 years, you should have a working card until 2 years after the purchase date, no matter how many times they replace it.

I have no idea - I don't overclock it or monitor card temps..I just let it run. It's quiet and it has worked great so far.

Sorry to revive this for another quick question but I figured it would be better than starting an all new topic to begin with. It's sorta related anyways.

I've been tinkering with mycomputer and it appears that there are more issues with it that led me to think just getting a new one altogether would be better. The onboard graphics and a few USB ports no longer work as well as the on board sound ports (thank god I have a sound card to use or I'd die without my music). THere are some other things starting to happen as well and I think it's just on the fritz.

Anyways, for christmas I now have the option of asking for a new computer. The thing is, I am limited in choices. My parents refuse to allow me to custom build a Computer, and they also refuse to buy anywhere other than retail stores (I don't know call em lazy or something). Also, even though the rest of the computer may be craptacular I do fully intend on buying a new graphics card within a month or so anyways, so the attention should only be paid to the rest of the computer components.

I've found one that's on for a really good deal for what you get it seems, and I've been looking through the internet to find reviews but can't find too many, so I know you people know a lot about the stuff.

Also, I am aware that gateway does not exactly have a good reputation.. But then again if you asked me I'd give a big negative on Sapphire at the moment as well, so you never know. It's worth a shot I guess.

Here are the specs:

gateway 5x series
23 screen
windows 7,
intel core 2 quad Q8300 2-SGHZ,
6 GB ram,
750 GB hard drive,
Intel GMAx4500HD graphics,

Again I'll be upgrading the GFX soon enough and I've got a 500W power supply I can toss in there that's relatively new, as well as another 2GB of Kingston RAM I can put in there to give me complete overkill on the RAM.

Is this worth the $688 it's listed for? It's the fastest computer I've found for that price. I'm mostly unsure about the processor since I'll be doing a LOT of gaming on it. As well as some video editing (which I know the card takes careof)

Thanks again

If you have a costcto membership they have good prices on canned computers but in addition, they extend the warranty to 2 years on all computers. May be worth looking in to.

No membership, plus this is for a christmas gift so I have choice only over what the specs are at the stores they choose to shop at.

Not sure what you had (didn't read the whole post, sorry...) but there was a sale on Geforce 9800 GT cards for $75. Those still function pretty well on most games, unless you want to be on bleeding edge tech, it would last at least another year.

ATi 5770 all the way, The driver software might suck balls but it's good power for the money.

Agreed, the 5770 is quite a good buy. The drivers have really been improving lately. Except for the Catalyst interface. That sucks balls.

Well, they probably require manufacturers to meet design specifications. But manufacturing is a different issue. Cheapass brands like HIS can be hit or miss. If you get one that was well made, it may run forever. Others may die within a week. Seems a problem with quality control, not design, which ATI can't do much about.

XFX makes really nice cards. Fun anecdote: my dad has three XFX GeForce 7600 GS cards, all fanless, that have run perfectly for years. Any time I need to look at a budget card I look at XFX because they have very nice fanless designs.

Lower resolution to set GPU scaling...
I swear it's just one big troll. I have legacy drivers on my x1950 that are better.

Why would you need to scale the image if you're running at native res

scale on a secondary monitor i believe.

It defaults to underscan for HDTV output. The new catalyst drivers aren't too friendly to set everything up, but once it's set right everything works perfectly. The interface / execution could definitely be better, but the actual graphics drivers are just fine.

To manage the scaling settings so that it will scale something running at less then native, you have to first set it to less then native. Rather then just being able to manage the settings at native.
So if you decided that to change it so that when you run Rogue Squadron or whatever it scales in a different way, you will find the options are greyed out at native.
It's so dumb it's hard to explain.

What's your budget?

This is decent but it's $1300 (which is sorta iffy because you can build the same exact thing for about $1000-1100 but alas). It does not need a GPU upgrade.

If your price range is 500-750,

This is solid and doesn't includ a vid card so you can buy one to go with it.

This is also solid (similar to what you found)