Good and Bad

Well, I had this video card for about 1.5 years now, bought new for $400. First I had it with a athlon XP 2000+ and games ran smooth, on highest resolution on all games that came out that year, Max payne 2, Vice City. This beast can process all the polygons that you can throw at it with games. This year I started to play new games on my newly built pc with this the same card, it ran Half Life 2 at 1028*768 and everthing on high very smooth with all the water reflections and stuff. It's great. It ran Doom 3 quite smooth too.
Things went smooth until I dicovered the lethal problem of this card--instability. Games will froze on ATI drivers after approx 30 min. sometimes 60. I thought the problem is caused by the cpu.
Then I upgraded my pc to a P4 3.0ghz with HT 512of ram, a pc case with 5 system fans. Then i bought a ThermalTake Butterfly 480W powersupply to ensure there's enough power to the video card. I think the problem will be solved but, it's not. Then I thought this is probably caused by improper cooling due to the small size of the stock heatsink. So I bougt a Cool Vivia Heat sink that have heatspreader on both side of the card with a heatpipe to connect the two. Then I start using Omega Drivers downloaded from Omegadrivers.net, ran the card without FastWrite and at AGP 4X. that finally solved all the problems.(make sure you got the newest omega drivers) But it's a beast! I ran Half Life 2's video stress test and I got 96 average FPS. It's great considering this card is couple years old now.