First off, i was playing a game last night and my screen went all corrupt. I figured it just overheated so i shut her down and moved on, later when i went back it ran fine no glitching until i got to a massive area in the game with a crap load of shaders. it then froze and kicked the bucket, no game will load or it does and then goes all wonky, color blocks everywhere.
Sadly my 8800GT workhorse has died. And i need a new card, these are the 4 cards I'm looking at: HD5770, GTX260, 9800GT, HD4870 -- my last 2 Nvidia based cards both had either bad shader cores or bad memory so im a little on fence about getting another. Thankfully windows runs fine, just not games...
The HD5770 is what is looking good to me, Runs Cooler with better power usage of them all. But its lacking in performance where others exceed. Keep in mind My target resolution is 1680x1050. I will not be going higher than that.

I am running an ATI 4870 inmy AMD 64 Vista Box no problems ever and running things as old as MM1 and as New as DAO.

I had ATIs 9800, X550, X1650 PRO and now 4870, never had any problems with them. But when i gave 9800 to my friend he had some driver issues until he installed alternative drivers. They were called Omega or something. All except X550 was Sapphire.

After looking at card history's between the XFX company and them. It seemed Sapphire had the least DOA's and the most success...