Artifacts Artifacts Artifacts!

Man, I just love jumping the gun on everytyhing! Everything was flowing along pretty well in stage 2. The PC ws doing a great job of pumping everything through the XBox 360 to the TV. So, it was time to go to stage 3...connection to the TV. At first, I thought it was going perfectly. Everything seemed to be OK and everything was working. Comskip was great, my DVD l;ibrary was fine. I was happy. And then, we put it through its paces under normal usage. Yesterday, I sat down and atched the Masters, Jen watched some of her programs last night, and I'm completely underwhelmed. After about 5 minutes of viewing HD content, the picture developes horizontal tearing across it. This is particularly noticeable during fast motion action, so following a golf ball on the picture was impossible. And it got worse as the day went on. Even in SD, we started seeing artifacts all over the place! It was terrible! Immediately, I went into reaction mode and searched all over the place until I found this on ATI's website under the knowledge base articles for the X1600:

737-25515: Display corruption may be noticed when watching TV under the Windows Vista operating system when using an ATI Radeon X1600 series product
The information in this article applies to the following configuration(s):
Radeon® X1600 series
Windows Vista
Symptoms:Display corruption may be noticed when watching TV under the Windows Vista operating system when using an ATI Radeon X1600 series product
Solution:Currently there is no solution.ATI Engineering has been advised of this issue and is investigating. Any updates will be published when they become available

You're joking, right? On top of that, I notied that the blacks began to degrade over time as we watched something last night. Hmmm...again, a quick search on ATI's knowledge base uncovered another article saying that the blacks will degrade over time with the X1600 ni Vista Media Center! Friggin' wonderful! This explains why no one on TGB is using this card. NVidia cards are the card of choice by a long shot, and now I'm truly understanding why. I've been an NVidia fan for a long time, and my loyalty waivered earlier in this project. However, after reading this and going through all of this, I'm back to being an NVidia guy. At least the problem with my NVidia card was defective hardware, not an unrecoverable bug!

So, New Egg has received my RMA'ed card as of Friday according to UPS. Of course, New Egg has not acknowledged the receipt of this card yet. No big deal, they say it takes 2-3 days for them to process it. It just can't happen soon enough for me at this point. I'm not happy with this X1600 now. Sure, it's stable, however, because of the hardware issues I ran into initially, my standards dropped a bit and I was accepting "Well, at least it's running!" Upon eflecting, I'm no longer accepting this. I need perfection. I might have to go back to MCE 2k5 to get it as the drivers are far more mature, but I will if that's what it takes.