
Just to follow up, it's now been six months since the oven fix, and I still haven't bought the replacement video card

My 8800 is proving to be a real trooper... it's worked without a hitch all this while... not that I've had much time to play and stress it with work and all (which nearly consumes my life), but it's nice to know that my GPU is still alive and kicking after so long. I've even used it for some heavy duty 3D rendering work... there were times when I completely forgot that this card was ever once broken beyond repair.
This week I felt that the lack of playing was about to drive me nuts, so I got to playing ArmA2 again... I did get some artifacts once (they were up for a very short while), and didn't see them again after the restart that promptly followed that... I guess it was acting out because of the lack of attention of the last months