Ok, when ATI put the X850 cards on sale for 140.00, I bought two of them. One for me, one for a friend (he paid me back for it). When they dropped the price to 120, I bought two more, one for the girl friend and one, I was thinking to sell on E-bay to make a little cash on it (didn't happen since a bunch of other people had the same idea).

Since then, I've installed Vista on two seperate HD's. An 80 gig on my main box and a 80 gig on my girlfriends. I wanted to see what both boxes were able to do with Vista and see how it ran. Since installing the Cat Beta drivers for Vista on both boxes, after about a day of being installed, I'm getting little red and blue pixel boxes all of the screen on my box and green lines about 5 pixels long on the girlfriends. I've unplugged both drives and plugged in the XP HD's to both machines and the problem is still there. My box is showing the red and blue dots on the BIOS screen when booting up though. Her's is not but the green lines show up in XP after she logs into it. Up until the Vista Cat driver were installed, both cards were working just fine. I've installed the third card that I bought into my main box so I can play games in XP but I'm worried about plugging in the Vista HD because of it screwing up the card.

My question to this is, how much of an impact does the drivers have to the direct configuration of the hardware? This can't be just coincidence that both cards messed up after being installed on the Vista HD.

I'm really kind of irritated that mine messed up, since I was able to OC the thing to the XTPE speeds. Her's I've never tried to OC so I don't know where the issue is with hers.

Thoughts on this?

I've contacted ATI about doing an RMA on my card and it looks like I'm going to end up doing the same on hers but I'm wondering where the problem is.

RMA'ing both cards. Mine and my girlfriends. Both were working fine in XP and then go to Vista and they both screw up. Same problem with both cards. I'm more irritated with mine but oh well. My problem is with cards that I just bought at either 140 or 120$, had this happen to a X1900XTX for a 450, I'd be down right pissed.

Obi, I know you have the card, I don't know if you've done any testing on Vista and the drivers they released, but I sure as hell wouldn't install the beta drivers that ATI has right now.  Warning to all at the moment.

Just posting an update for the people that I know have more expensive cards then I do (at least that are ATI). Don't install the beta drivers from ATI.