lol, hi Sam..

This is a problem I've seen all to often, and strangely enough, only with Gainward cards. I think they only manufacturer these in the hope that "some poor smuck" will buy them.. well.. Sam, I'm afraid your one of them! It may have an NVidia chip onboard, but I'm afraid for the rest of the card, it has been manufactured cheapy - poor quality.

My Advice:

1) Send it back as quickly as possible.. don't look back!
2) Burn it.. burn it now.. pleeease!

Buy a decent NVidia card from a respected manufacturer, just not Gainward.

for the sake of my 260 quid i just spent, i hope your joking.

I bought it off the internet! from overclockers.co.uk how can i take it back!?!

We really have been sooo far down this road with Gainward, we spent weeks looking for a solution, but it really is a card problem. We tested 3 different cards in 3 completely different PC's. We contacted Gainward directly and they were absolutely no help and claimed it was an NVidia driver problem. We used BF2 and Ground Control II as a test. It seems to be tree's that the glitches mainly occur. In BF2 it looks like bats or flies around the trees when you move. In Ground Control, the whole area was covered in jumpy black squares is the best way I could describe it. With the two 6600's cards, every now an again the screen would go blank for a few seconds for no reason and at one point, when you minamised a window, you would have pixels of the window left on the screen. On the 7900 the PC would reboot when you started doing anything graphically intestive, you would not be able to sit though a whole DVD.

Overclockers (Overclockers UK - Support) doesn't even show Gainward as one of their listed manufacturers. You may want to contact them directly (Contact Overclockers UK) and see if they will allow you to exchange your product.

Not overclockers! They were very bad customer service and didnt keep their stock updated for me, im not going there again. I bought a case there because no where else had it. There quite expensive aswell, when you get a new card get it from Scan.co.uk much cheaper.

Plenty of 7950gt's here:

Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

Just dont buy any gainward ones.

Ok, before everyone pressures me into taking this back (if i can) im gonna try a few things.
I reinstalled XP again and installed battlefield 2142, which managed to load up like normal (which it couldnt do on vista, it just had flashy lines) but i havnt been able to test it yet.
Also, when i reinstalled XP, my 5.1 speakers seem to work perfect.

Im gonna install Counter Strike and see if that loads.

Ok, problem solved. It must of been some kinda Vista driver problems.

All games are working fine with high definition goodness. The audio is now perfect and crisp and everything runs nice and smooth.

Soooo, everyone, my graphics card isnt a hunk of junk, just some driver problems.

Thanks for help!