Okay just got off the line with evga and they are willing to swap the 480 for a 570 to see if this fixes the refresh problem.

I have to admit that in all of this I am very impressed with the degree to which evga has been willing to help me resolve this issue.

First the 285's were 4 years old but did come with lifetime warranties. So the gtx 480 was affectively an upgrade but I lost half a GB of memory (the 285 had 2GB of DDR3 and was a factory overclocked while the model 480 had 1.5GB of DDR5).

The 570HD will have slightly less performance but does have 2.5GB of DDR5 memory. It has the same number of cuda cores as the 480 and a bit less power consumption.

We are going to swap them out one at a time so I still have one 480 while I am waiting for the replacement. Unfortunately they do not cross ship so it will take a week for them to get my 480 and then another week for me to get the replacement.


PS - I also called in some favors with some old friends I know at AD that came over from SGI / Alias and spoke for more then an hour with a couple high level techs.

I was left a bit more deflated though as from what I was told they have seen this issue on every type graphics card - geforce, radeon, quadro, and firepro! They confirmed what ND said in that they have seen machines with exactly the same hardware and some have the problem and some do not. So there is still no gauranty the 570 will fix the problem.