Sapphire warranty query

[Teran]

Hi my HD4890 has recently been misbehaving, I've tried drivers old and new and been experiencing some very nasty visuals, and I've had some blue screens of death. I've swapped it out for another card and it all works fine. I think it's still under the 2 year warranty until around the 16th of September, could you let me know how/who/where I should send it to get it replaced?

[Teran]

Still waiting....2 online queries, as well as this and facebook, no confirmation of receipt of any query. 2 year warranty expires tomorrow, call me paranoid but I've printed off all my attempts online. I'll try using the phone tomorrow if I get time during the day, can't say I'm too impressed

[Teran]

O.k rather than ranting. I'll have a go at describing the issue in detail....at least I can copy and paste it over later to the OLQ if they get back to me..or perhaps somebody has had similar issue and knows of a fix.
The card was received after a prior RMA in replacement of a faulty 4850x2 soon after 16th Sept 2009 (date stated complete on the RMA invoice).

Sapphire HD4890 vapor-x 1G GDDR5 PCI-E HDMI/DP/DVI-I/VGA,

PN 288-1E115-020SA
SKU# 11150-05-21R.
My O/S is Vista 64 basic,

Driver Packaging Version 8.881-110728a-122939C-ATI
Catalyst Version 11.8
Provider ATI Technologies Inc.
2D Driver Version 8.01.01.1178
2D Driver File Path /REGISTRY/MACHINE/SYSTEM/ControlSet001/Control/CLASS/{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}/0003
Direct3D Version 7.14.10.0855
OpenGL Version 6.14.10.11005
Catalyst Control Center Version 2011.0728.1756.30366
AMD Audio Driver Version 6.58.0.6602

Problem: After longer periods of time playing games the card stops to render the backgrounds fully, tears appear in the textures showing the wrong textures or none at all i.e a triangle of stone texture in long grass, or the seabed on the water surface. In lighting, shadows render full black and pure white in beams of light. Shortly after thin horizontal lines appear across the screen with changing colours which is followed by the blue screen of death reporting hardware failure. There is also a random flicker on the desktop and internet explorer, which does not occur in games. Please note that the settings at which I've played the games are ones that worked fine for over a year and it is only the past 6 weeks or so I've been experiencing these problems, and lowering the settings merely buys a little more playtime. List of some of games tested with errors Assassins Creed, Assassins creed2,, Assassins creed brotherhood, Dragon Age 2, TES4 Oblivion, Age of Conan, Rift, Battlefield: BC2 to name a few.

Things I've tried: Updating and rolling back drivers, using clean installs and the ati update software. Playing with the settings on CCC, checking refresh rates etc. Lowering game settings. Cleaning the card. Turning cooling fans up. Fitting fans to increase airflow over card. Taken side of case off. Removed card completely and replaced with nvidia product.

The only thing that I've tried that has had any success is removing the card and replacing it with nVidia card and drivers, I don't own another Ati card sadly to just swap the hardware. Another thing which maybe nothing is that dxdiag only detects 756MB of RAM on the card. After some digging around on the net I've read that there was a dodgy batch of these cards but to be fair mine has been the best card I've ever owned and done everything I've ever asked of it until recently and I've been very pleased with it. If anyone has any ideas lemme know ta

[DavidM]

We replied to your query at 9:22 am this morning.

I've resent the reply to your hotmail address, as another email was used.

[Teran]

Thanks for reply, sods law about the warranty! Any suggestions for a fix? Or is it sounding terminal?