elixeus

Okay, so a little over a week ago I ordered a Sapphire X800GTO online. I put it in, and from the moment of installation I display corruption. At the time me not knowing much of the lingo, I found out later these are called artifacts.

Let me just summarize a lot of stuff happened. It would even artifact on windows loading screen when I started up... It would totally render polygons that didn't exist in WoW as well. But from what I read I heard that artifacting is mainly caused by overheating. Okay... I understand that, but I felt the card and it wasn't exactly burning me or anything. So I also read some where that it could also be caused by conflicting drivers. I did uninstall the Nvidia before installing the ATI stuff, but I hear you need to run something more extensive (a program, Driver Cleaner?) to clean your system...

So my question is this. I already RMA'd the card. But I'm very concerned about experiencing the same heartache when looking for another videocard, especially if the problem was caused by overheating (which I don't believe to be the case). It only supports AGP and I want last of the crop to install, so I need to know, what are all the causes of artifacting? In the case of what happened to me (I can be more specific), what do you think most likely happened? Do you have any recommendations on last of the line AGP cards, it could be Nvidia or ATI. I prefer Nvidia since of these problems with ATI, past few years I heard they were good but now I am starting to believe they haven't changed the way they used to be, good hardware, lousey drivers. I am also looking for a card that has a track record for running cool. I am current running an Nvidia Geforce FX 5200

Thanks in advance for your responses!