Throughout all this I can only say good things about EVGA. I started with a pair of gtx 265 2GB DDR3 cards I bought over 4 years ago. There were top of the line FTW models and did come with a lifetime warranty.

One of my 285's failed and since they no longer had equivalent 285's in their replacement inventory the upgraded them to gtx 480's with 1.5GB of DDR5. They had .5GB less ram but the DDR5 ram is much faster as was the entire card. The 480 had more the twice the cuda cores and was DX11 complieant where the 285's were only DX10 compliant.

But unfortunately the card did not resolve the refresh issue and in fact it has occurred more frequently then with the 285. Also, and this is a real dissapointment - the over all performance in maya say for rotating a large poly count model is significantly slower then the 285, particularly with two-sided lighting on!

I did some research and it turns out this is going to be the case with any geforce card beyond the 285's. It seems the 8000, 9000, and 200 series geforce cards were actually built on quadro cores and only the coded id on the card told the drivers they were geforce and not quadro. In fact there is a sw hack to fool nvidia quadro crivers into recognizing these cards as their equivalent quadro models. Unfortunately, for geforce cards from the 400 models on this is no longer the case and they do have hardware differences which result in reduced maya performance. However I found with two sided lighting off it was acceptable although the OCD part of me cringes when I go to move things and they are slowler then what I was used to with my gtx 285.

Since the refresh problem though is now even worse with the 480, evga support suggested that I could try the 570HD with 2.5GB DDR5. This gets me a gig more graphics memory and different hardware and driver software that might avert the refresh problem. There is a slight trade off in overall card performance compared to the 480 but the 570 is as large an upgrade as evga can provide from a 285.

I think this is more then fair as if push came to shove the refresh problem in Maya is not really evga's fault so I am grateful for the degree to which they have been trying to accommodate me with this issue. I can reach them 24/7 toll free, have never had a hard time getting to a tech, and they have even paid for all the shipping of parts back and forth.

I am really hoping the 570hd fixes this problem though as it's been 3 years that I have been dealing with this refresh problem and I am really sick to dealth of it and I do not want to have to go to a quadro and if I did get forced to a quadro and the problem did not go away I honestly think I would have to hurt someone! (jk)