If you read my post about my dead graphics card, then I am happy to say I am back in action. I sent out the card on Thursday, Jan. 4, it arrived on Monday, Jan. 8, at BFG. They shipped out the card the next day and I got my card back on Wednesday, Jan. 10. I am very impressed with the turn around time. The rep. gave me an estimate of 2 week turn around time and I got it in under a week. They sent me another BFG GeForece 7800GT OC and it seems to be running fine. I wanted to take some time and test the card out before officially stating that things are running fine. I am happy to report that I am getting temps in the mid 30’s C when it’s not under load and an average of 68C while under load. Kudos again to BFG.

I built my current PC back in October 2005. When I was deciding on the parts I decided to get a BFG graphics card because of their lifetime warranty. My friend bought a BFG card a few years ago and is currently on his third card from them after having the first 2 replaced and each time has been an upgrade for him. I purchased the BFG GeForce 7800GT OC 256MB card. This has been a great card and plays anything at full resolution my my Dell 24″ screen.

For Christmas I got the new game Company of Heroes, which I played a few times before noticing that my graphics card fan was getting extremely loud. So I downloaded RivaTuner to see how hot my card was getting. I had it log the temperature and the graphics card was getting up to 110C, which is extremely hot. When it’s not under load it’s around 64C.

After a couple days Company of Heroes stopped loading. It was getting me an error saying it cannot find a rendering device. I fired up dxdiag and my graphics card had “n/a” listed for Total Memory. I tried reinstalling the nvidia drivers and directx9, which neither had an effect.

So, I then decided to call BFG, who has 24/7 support and all are in the U.S. I called around 5:30PM and was on hold for a little over 15 minutes, when I got a hold of a live person and told him my card model and that it was getting 110C under load, with the fan getting very load. He asked a few questions of things to try, but pretty much came to the conclusion that the card was dead. He issued an RMA and I shipped the card off on 1-4-07. They said it’s usually a 2 week turnaround time. Hopefully it won’t be quite that long, esp. since they are actually located in the same state as me.

I must say I will recommend BFG from now on. It is so nice being able to actually talk to someone in the U.S. and he really knew what he was talking about.