I bought a new video card back in January, a Albatron GF4 ti4280 (8xAGP) and it has worked perfectly till now.. i had it overclocked to 280/567 core/mem. which was a little below where it would get screen tearing/artifacts.. works fine for 2 months.. then went to play a directx game the other day, and saw artifacts, so i lowered the clock a little, same thing.. a little more, same thing.. then i lowered it ALL the way back to the factory settings 250/513 and it STILL had artifacts and screen tearing??!?!! i then reinstaled drivers/directx/and reflashed my video card with no luck.. works fine in 2d/opengl mode (but i dont play opengl games..) Did i fry it? HELP!

check directx settings, specifically VSYNCH, this limits the Frames per second of the game to the refresh rate of the monitor, not doing this can cause tearing. And if 99% of the games you play are OpenGL games, then this setting may not be optimized for DirectX.

Right click the desktop, go to settings, advanced, yada yada until you see DirectX settings. then flip the Vsynch switch and check again.

If you dont use it, i would recomment a program called RivaTuner to tweak your video card, it is usefull for overclocking on both the driver level and the hardware level and it also houses the settings for DirecX, and OpenGL like the one i refrenced above.

Good luck, let me know if this helps.

WELL, i have already messed with and tried that, but same outcome.. at the moment vsync is set to (app controlled) and even with the other settings it does the same.. called Albatron.. they want me to ship it to them for testing, and then said they would send me a new one when it was determined bad.. (3 week process total).

hahahaha, they are messin around with u dude, dont send them ur card man, when ur card is "processing" u dont know what has happend to it...it could take longer than 3 weeks, and all they could do is say "nothing is wrong with it" and send it back witht he same problems, i wouldnt sugest sending ur card to them (you have to pay for shiping, thats stupid) if u cant live with the problem then i would say start lookin for a new card, but if u can live with it then live with it
hope this helps

Or buy a new card AND send the old one back, keep 'er for a spare if it ever comes back LOL

well, im definately not going to "LIVE WITH IT" considering it has whats called a "WARRANTY" and if it means i DO have to pay 5 bucks for shipping then i would definately do it, because im not going to deal with a card that has those problems..

Just so you know, once you overclocked it, the bios on the video card has logged the overclocking and basically now your warranty is cancelled. Unless they don't have a way to test of OC, you are pretty much screwed.

I guess that would hold true.. except for the fact that i just flashed the bios, so there would no longer be a record of that..

Trust me, there will still be a way to find out. I mean look into our technology today.

oh well.. if they just send it back to me and say that, then i guess i will just ebay it off or something.. was going to get the fx5800 anyways..