For The Love Of Hardware - Finale

The card is going back to NewEgg. I finally got my dot problem semi-fixed by reducing hardware acceleration down a notch (which I thought I had tried before) - but this small victory apparently annoyed the hardware gods because afterwards no game would run properly ... even after switching settings back.

My amateur diagnosis? Heatsink might have been bad causing slow memory chip death. I think card was going to get progressively worse - hence the return. I'll try to replace with a non-open box card of similar strength.

Thanks to Mike for suggesting to turn off Fast Write yesterday - I should have noted that since it is easily one of the most common solutions for this kind of problem.