Giorgos

Do I have to do anything else apart from register my product? Do I have to send my receipt from now?

CDsDontBurn

no, just register it on the website is all that you need to do. however, a copy of the receipt/invoice is required for ANY step-up or RMA request.

although i do recommend that you upload a *.jpg format copy of your invoice/receipt to the website once you have registered your new gfx card. this would be a "just in case" thing if you lose your original invoice/receipt.

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Tipstaff

Correct, however I did find something interesting. I have a test system at work that I tried 3 cards on: an 8600GT, an 8800GT, and 9600GT. HD movies, such as compressed MKV files or straight Blu Ray/HD-DVD ran far smoother on the 9600GT than on the other 2 cards. The 8800GT did fine in a lot of case, but once I bumped up to 1080p some movies would stutter (the last Die Hard film for instance did this), while on the 9600GT it ran silky smooth (the 8600GT, btw, even 720p ran choppy some times). It was a bit of shock, because as you said, it's the same chip running both cards, so what is it that is causing the one to not perform as the other?

As for using hardware support to play mkv, I primarily use PureCodec 2008, which includes mkv support via Media Player Classic Home Cinema, and has DXVA support (and also has Cyberlinks 264 Decoder, which supports ATI cards if I remember correctly). Once you open a video you can right click inside, go into Options, and change the Playback/Output renderer to either VMR9 in XP (do not use the Direct3D Fullscreen option btw), or EMR for Vista. There is also Haalis renderer, which can be smoother in some instances (and I primarily use it for subtitled films), but it doesn't work on x64 yet.

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