OK I have posted many times about the artifacts I've been seeing in Warlords within 5 minutes of play. However, I was not being fair. I see the same behavior for a lot of the demo's I've downloaded (Paraworld, Call of Juarez, Caesar 4). Most of these are new demos; I have not seen this in AOE3, Bad day LA, etc. So now I have to come to terms that it is my evga 7800 gt that is the source of the problems.

I browsed the evga forums and I noticed a few saying that you need to flash your bios in order to get rid of these artifacts. I did just that but now my card is running extremely hot. ATM, it is idling at 69 degree which is absurd. At load, it gets to 83 C until I start seeing artifacts and then freezes.

Given this temperature is it even worth it to replace with a Zalman VGA fan and AS5 paste. I've seen temp drops of 10-12 degrees possible. Is this enough given my current state. Alertnatively, is there a way to revert back the BIOS; unfortunately I was a dummy and didn't back it up. What sites are there that carry old evga bios files.

Or am I out of luck and need to get a new card.

Another possibility is that I flashed to the wrong bios but from what I've seen it seems to be right. I may have potentially grabbed the CO version with the heat sink so that's probably why the heat change is so dramatic.

I did just that but now my card is running extremely hot. ATM, it is idling at 69 degree which is absurd. At load, it gets to 83 C until I start seeing artifacts and then freezes.

Um, that's pretty standard. Everyone I've talked to with a 7800GT or GTX gets temps in that range. The core threshold for the 7800GTX is 115C - the GT's certainly shouldn't be 40C lower.

Or am I out of luck and need to get a new card.

eVGA's warranty covers just about anything even screwing up a BIOS flash or killing the card by overclocking. Talk to them about a replacement under warranty.

Ok but 69 C from 45-50 idle after the BIOS update is definitely not supposed to happen.

I got the card off of ebay and it worked fine for all my games F.E.A.R., Quake 4, Doom 3, Civ 4, etc. It's just that none of the newer games are working without artifacts. That's why I chose to update. I'll look into an RMA.

Could just be the thermal paste has crapped up. Card manufacturers generally put any of crap in there. Often they use the thermal stickers which come unstuck after a while. Try remounting it with some AS5 to see if that makes a difference.

IIrc my 7800gtx was idling around 70c before I put watercooling on.

Ok it seems to be an ambient temperature problem. The weather has been cooler these last two days and I was able to idle at 57C. Much improved from the 69C that I was seeing earlier in the week. I guess the artifacting is still not related to the temperature then. I have emailed evga and asked them to assist.

Thanks guys. The idle temps that you wrote about definitely put me at ease.

So according to tech support, looks like I have to RMA. Sucks for me since I don't have a spare PCI card. Well I guess I'm at least lucky that their RMA service is so lenient.