New graphics card advice required

[AndyScotland]

Hi All,

As you may/may not have noticed I've been offline for a while now below is the reason:

I took part in the BF3 beta & quite enjoyed it (even with it crashing on me 60% of the time I tried it!). As a fix to this I bought myself another 8800GTS 512MB graphics card & an SLI bridge. As well as this I needed to get another PSU too. They worked great for a while until only 1 of the cards was being recognized. I thought it may have been the PSU so I got it replaced but the same thing was happening. I got a program that analyses temperatures & it looks like both of them were running at 70 degrees plus for quite a while. I then decided to swap them over to see if this made a difference - this is where things started to go wrong...... I might have touched the bottom of 1 of the cards with a power cable now when I try using it all I get is a series of pink squares then a crash. Whilst the other one allows me to use Win 7 for about 2 mins, up pops the box saying a driver has failed but has been fixed, then appox 30 seconds I get a BSOD which mentions nviddmkm.sys. Did a bit of googling tried some of the 'fixes' none worked. Tried doing a complete re-install of Win 7 - still get the same error. It works in same mode but that's not a lot of use!
so
A) has anyone ANY ideas? or
B) any suggestions for a new card round about the 130-150 quid mark? I started a new job in November but still haven't bought myself anything nice - have just paid off various debts. I'm gonna need a new card pretty soon as I'm getting bored not playing any shooty shooty games &the new version of counterstike is rumored to be coming out soon!!

Cheers

Andy

[jackDEFECTORbauer]

You could try this http://www.ofcgaming.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5012 - involves cooking the card to reheat the solder on it. Not sure if your problem is caused by that or not but if the card is dead, why not have a go?

Next gen Radeon cards are meant to be out this month, so prices could drop soon too.

[Gavac220]

Jack's suggestion would be my first stop, then buy a Radeon HD6950 for £140-150ish. You can unlock this card to a 6970 if you so wish in the future, but it runs all current games maxed out at high fps. BF3 included.

Here is a link to a thread on the card I bought and why :- http://www.ofcgaming.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5449

[bambam]

Andy are you saying *neither* card works even when installed on its own? 70-degree temps are normal for a busy card (I think 80 would be ok). Rather that having the PC crash in a regular game, did you run a hands-off test e.g. http://unigine.com/products/heaven/ ?

[OFCNOFEAR]

my msi ultra 8800 went the same way mate , if your looking at a new card then overclockers has a good deal at mo ! asus nvidia gtx560ti looks a good spec also you get bf3 download ticket thrown in for 191.99

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =GX-267-AS

price went up 6.0 in a week lol

hope this helps mate , also true about cooking card you have to strip som plastic off it and other bits but my tec man wants to have a go at my 8800 ultra as it did cost me 385. 4 years ago