About 8 months ago, my fianceé decided to buy a computer from Dell. She ended up getting their top of the line gaming rig and it worked flawlessly up to a week ago. She calls up Dell support and they walk her through a bunch of things and tech came to the conclusion that it was video cards that were bad. Dell asks if she could replace the cards herself if they send new ones out and she said she could. She asked the teck what to do with the old cards, should she send them back or keep them and the Dell tech told her to keep them. So Dell sends out 2 GTX 280 cards and we get them a couple of days later.
I pop in the new cards for her and she's back up and running and happy. Being curious, I wanted to see which of the two GTX 280 cards when bad and figured I'd then use the good one on my machine and chuck out the bad one. I pop in the first GTX card, boot up my machine and it works. So I power down, remove the first card and pop in the 2nd one. Boot up and to my surprise, this one works too. So I power down again, pop in the other card and hook up the SLI bridge and fire up the computer and the problem my fiancee had is showing up (pixelized screen). Figure out the problem off the bat, it's the SLI bridge. I run a couple of blocks to work, talk one of the TQA guys into giving me a spare SLI bridge they have, run back home and slap it on the video cards. Boot up and both cards are working perfectly. The problem the entire time was the SLI bridge and not the video cards.
Just to be sure that I am in the clear, I have my fiancee contact Dell again to confirm that we didn't have to send back the 'defective video cards' they sent the replacement for. The Dell tech assured us that we didn't have to send back the 'broken' cards. I now have to perfectly good GTX 280 cards in my machine to replace my trusty and dependable ATI HD3850 and without having to spend close to $800 for both cards.
ack-ack
