July last year saw me splurge out on a new box. At the time I got an MSI GeForce 768MB O/Clocked 8800GTX. It cost me a decent chuck of the final PC price ($820 AUD).
This card was beautiful. It just ate up every game I threw at it smoothly and perfectly. Running at 1920 resolution on my 26 inch Acer.
A year later my PC died whilst playing HL2. Turns out that between my GFX card and Sound card was a small little firewire chip that controlled the 1 firewire port at the back (that I had an external HDD plugged to with all my mp3s).
The poor little chip got so worked up after 6 or so hours of gaming and simultaneously listening to music that it burnt out.
Needless to say it fried a few components in my system. Graphics card, RAM and motherboard.
It took many months for Asus to replace my board (as they didn't sell them anymore).
However MSI quickly replaced my video card. Upon handing in the card I learnt that it was old stock and no longer produced.
I was quite anxious to learn what I would get back. However 4 weeks later (ok so that part wasn't great) they returned to me a brand new 1GB MSI GeForce 9800 GX2 (SLI on the one board).
I was extremely happy as I got a great, more powerful, newer generation of card replaced for my faulty card for free.
Happiness is twin floppies.