no sir... it won't be a bit of fun at all. I am gonna have to find something else to do sadly!

No computer for 2 weeks would be difficult for me.

yeah... I have a question. my motherboard has onboard graphics. can I use the onboard graphics without a graphics card inside my computer case?

Yes. But I wouldn't expect good performance with games that make heavy use of the GPU.

You do need to tinker a bit to activate the onboard video acceleration though, install drivers for it and activate in the BIOS.

okay.... thats awesome I can use the onboard graphics. all I would do mostly is surf the net, check email, and look at some gamefaqs guides for a game or two.

EDIT: got the integrated video drivers installed, I did tweak it in the bios to where my primary graphics is integrated.

the video card got sent out yesterday. shipping was $10.35 for priority. I may either get my original card back or they will send me a new one. will let you know when I know more.

Lets hope the card was the culprit in the first place.

yeah... I hope so too. if they cannot fix the issue with my original card, they will send me a new one. hopefully a new one that will WORK like its supposed to.

That is what I was hinting at above; do we know for sure that the original card was broken in the first place? Something like that can't be proven. We will find out the truth when you install the replacement.

it will be the end of august by the time I get either my original card back or I get a replacement. not sure yet.

I hope I end up getting a replacement card instead of my original back. that would be good.

If the original is fine, then a replacement wouldn't operate any differently.

true... but I will know sometime if I get my original card back or a replacement.

oh hey Bjossi do you remember me showing the Dawn of war pictures on the first page of this thread? the graphics anomalies? thats what is called "artifacting". do you know anything about it?

Powercolor just received my video card in the mail yesterday and said they will return it ASPS. as soon as possible, they will send either the original or a replacement card back to me.

Yes. I made a pretty good post about it on that same page.

yes you did.... I found out about "video card artifacting" by doing some research on it. I wish I would have RMAed the video card earlier.

Don't know if it was covered since I did a quick skim over the thread, but make sure your card is not overheating!

As I said in my post on page 1, overheating sometimes causes artifacts but they do not get captured on screenshots. The same applies to buggy DirectX or OGL renderers. It is up to the drivers to render a screenshot, the card just provides computing time for that process.

Though a screen dump would potentially display these artifacts since it dumps whatever work the GPU was doing into a viewable file.

@Echo 419...... I have 3 120MM fans in my computer, plus a system blower to keep my sound card cool (since my first one got too hot and never worked again.) my graphics card had a fan on it.

I have 7 total fans in my case and my 8800 still gets quite hot.

man... how big are your fans though? are they 120MM fans or are they smaller?

There smaller 80 mm ones but size doesn't always matter. You could have 50 fans and as long as the room itself is warm its not going to help much since its moving warm air through your case not cool air.

yeah... thats true. there are 250MM fans on certain cases as well now.

I had the RMA team send a similar card to mine back to me. its the X1950PRO 256MB SCS3.

this is the email:

Hello:
We check your card is OK!, now we don't have this card, we use X1950PRO 256MB SCS3 for you is OK!
Please let me know, we will ship back to you.
Thank you.

Wow. That guy has terrible English...

I'm not entirely sure I know what he's trying to say.

he also said my original card was fine. they can either send my original card back or they can send me the Powercolor X1950 PRO 256MB SCS3.

EDIT: I had them send MY original video card back to me.

I'll take a wild guess; ATi's tech support is not located in the US.

thats correct. the company itself is all the way in canada.

Don't they mostly speak english? I know of french and icelandic "colonies" over there but that's pretty much it. . .