Weird Sapphire 9700 problems?

[Delta2073]

Hey hey,
A few months ago i ordered a 9700NP off a person. The card came in and all SEEMED good.
Within the first day though, i started to get these artifacts for some weird reason. In game everything was toast, polygons messed to anything (looked like a extreme overclock at first). Checked my settings, all was stock. I then read up about how some motherboards had problems with the low rev'd 9700's.

Ended up my P4g DID have these problems, so i assumed that was the cause. 2 months later i got a p4p800-DLX and found out that yes, it had the 9700 problems too (i should really read the manual first eh?). My brother, Vegetto on here, got a NF7 a few weeks later. After a little while i decided to test it on his computer and found that it has the VERY SAME problems @_@.

http://deltaanime.net/9700.jpg. This is a sample of what it does sometimes. Anyone got any advice? possibly even a STOCK 9700 Sapphire bios? Sapphire won't give me anything nor will they RMA

EDIT - BAH! may the person who changed the standard BB code burn in hell!
~Francisco

 

Delta, did you disable fast writes using the SMARTGART utility in the ATI control panel?
I had a similiar problem when I upgraded to the ASUS P4P800. Disabling fast writes made it go away.
I noticed no performance loss after disabling fast writes. If there was any loss at all, it was negligable.

Good Luck,
GM

 

[Rellik]

I have got to say that I start to have serious duobts about Sapphire QC. I bought a new 9700 as well and just found out it shortend out my rig.
Couldn´t start. I now changed it to my old 8500 and everything is peachy. The 9700 caused troubles on 2 differnet, newly assembled rigs. A friend also ran into a "bad" sapphire 9700.