I've got to admit, it's a pretty good troll. I think just about every major hardware website posted links to Rage3d.
I found out my monitor flicker was caused by something called SMARTGART in the ATI drivers. It supposedly does hardware tests, which seem to cause my NEC monitor to flicker. For some reason, the 3.8 drivers did this at every reboot and after clicking apply for direct 3d and open gl settings. The 3.7s do it after changing settings, but not at bootup.
One other weird thing, my 9800 standard shows up as a 9800 PRO under device manager with the 3.7s and 3.8s. Since they are the same GPU, just clocked differently, this doesn't surprise me too much. I'm just wondering if the 3.8s could accidentally be overclocking my card. If they did, it didn't gain me any performance that I could see. Monitors may not be dying because of the 3.8s, but a lot of people are reporting their cards are not overclocking as well with the 3.8s, so there still may be something going on. I can tell you my card definately was overheating. After the system would lockup and I had reset the computer, the bios post screen was flickering and the text was scrambled and colored strangely. I've seen this before when video cards have overheated, and the card was definately too hot to touch the heatsink.
It may be partly a giant troll, but the 3.8 drivers did cause problems for me.
