Just a quick note to all who fancy a 9800 GTX 1Gb...a great card for the price (~£160)
HOWEVER!!!!
There are some SERIOUS issues concerning a batch that was released with the Revision 10 BIOS.
Basically, the card works great with any nVidia drivers BELOW 178's...which, lets be honest, arent much good these days!
If you want to update your drivers to 180+ (I went straight to the 181's..latest WHQL) then you will probably have a major panic attack as soon as you reboot your comp after installation....
because it will freeze halfway through loading and you will be looking at a nice pretty black screen with absolutely nothing on it.

Only way around this is to flash the BIOS to Revision 11 (for those with Samsung memory onboard) or Revision 20 for the other type of vRAM.
After this, it _should_ work OK...mine did.

Heres the linky to the relevant thread on the nVidia forums: (230+ posts already!!!)
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=84478


Hope this helps somebody!

Looks like nVidia screwed up. Gotta love it.

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

Looks like nVidia screwed up. Gotta love it.

nah....general consensus is that Gigabyte screwed up with the BIOS Revision...the earlier ones and the later ones work fine...apparently it was just the batch of cards with R10 BIOS that screwed up...

Oh, well I guess it doesn't help that most card manufacturers (ATi, nVidia) sell the designs to these other people, who then adjust the clock speeds slightly (all within ~250MHz or so of each other) and price them £250 apart. :doh:

Same with Sapphire 4870 with BSOD's. I flashed it to a newer version and it worked like a charm.

Today i installed nVidia 181.22 drivers and mine froze up too, only for 4-5min. And when installing, it froze up when 50% ready or something. Everything works great for me. Running on Gigabyte 8600GT (non clocked)

Quote from hazaky :

Today i installed nVidia 181.22 drivers and mine froze up too, only for 4-5min. And when installing, it froze up when 50% ready or something. Everything works great for me. Running on Gigabyte 8600GT (non clocked)

mmm.... I wonder if the fact that you have an 8600 GT and NOT a 9800 GTX 1Gb has anything to do with it??
This problem ONLY applies to the 9800GTX, (part number: N98XPZL-1GB), and it has nothing to do with a temporary freeze during installation (which happens while it is installing the PhysX drivers), but a complete and total lockup, along with the fact that you can no longer even boot into Windoze, except in safe mode.

Well, card's version doesnt do that. Chipset does. And as its sayd that its only on 9800GTX then it might be also on me, because on WinXP i didnt had such problem. U cant say that its not like that as i sayd ...

Quote from hazaky :

Well, card's version doesnt do that. Chipset does. And as its sayd that its only on 9800GTX then it might be also on me, because on WinXP i didnt had such problem. U cant say that its not like that as i sayd ...

[sarcasm] Oh sorry, I didnt realise that the 8600GT had exactly the same chipset as a 9800GTX...maybe I should have saved a lot of money and bought a cheap 8600 and adjusted the clock speeds so that it would go faster than my 9800GTX.
Maybe everybody has been mistaken, and instead of buying a Core 2 Quad, they should have bought a 1.8 Celeron instead...after all...from what you state, they must be the same![/sarcasm]

The 8600GT has a DIFFERENT GPU, a DIFFERENT Chipset, and even a DIFFERENT fan!!