my 4850 saga

hey guys. i bought a "triplex" (i dont know if you've ever heard of this brand name before) HD4850, its the cheapest 4850 variant available at my retailer so i figured i should go for it, which i did. i wasnt expecting a lot out of it, only for it to be significantly faster than my old 9600gt ichill. and i definitely wont be oc'ing it anyway.

nightmares occured the first time i used it on crysis warhead. bsod, vpu recover error started to happen, i was using xp pro sp2 at that time. so decided to fresh install my os and updated to sp3 (never knew a new sp have come out) again to no avail. so i hit some forums here and there asking for help, they're blaming my corsair PSU, a vx450 for being insufficient (33a on the 12v rails) the rest of my system spec are : q6600 @ 3.0ghz / p5k-se /3gb RAM ddr2 800. so decided to run my cpu @ stock, still to no avail. so its not my psu i suppose.

then i decided to switch to vista ultimate 32bit, which is a little hard on the wallet, im still accumulating the funds needed to have this activated. updated to sp1.

the result is that the crashes have become minimal, mostly occasional with the rest of my games (race driver grid, crysis, crysis warhead) but it never crashed, NOT EVEN ONCE on farcry2 which lead me to believe that it must be the drivers (8.10 - 8.12) that are screwing up (or maybe UBISOFT loves ATI, graw2 never crashed on this 4850 as well, no crashes on COD4, too). my 9600gt ichill never seemed to have any bsod/crash problems.

i had this card replaced by a brand new unit, same brand early december. so almost a month have passed and i still have the outright replacement accomodation from my retailer. and im considering the following options:

#1 downgrade to a 9800gt 1gb card which is a step down in performance but a step up in driver realiablity. which sort of defeats the purpose of my whole upgrade from my ichill since 9600gt ichill > 8800gt/9800gt stock. heres the link for the card

#2 step up to a 4850 1gb again from palit, i'll be adding somewhere around 40$ for this step up. heres the link.

#3 sell the card cheaper, use the money to buy a 9800gtx+ (my retailer dont have one)

#4 stick with the card, wait for another driver release. i had hopes that 8.12 will fix everything, turns out it didnt.

sorry for the long post but if you're in my position, where you feel a little confused and helpless what can you do? what will you do?