I currently have a nVidia GeForce 5950 Ultra 256MB video card. When playing high end games such as Doom 3 and Battlefield 2, the video begins to glitch, giving spotchy colors within the graphics. Have tried most recent drivers from nVidia, but problem persists. Checked for any overheating problems, and it seams there is an issue with the RAM on the card becoming overheated. I am looking to buy a replacement card, but I don't want to spend an excessive amount. Probably somewhere around $125 or less. Does anyone have any advice on a good graphics card to run mid-high end games? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

I'm not going to give any advice on a card. But how's your case temperature? If it's high that would explain why the video card is getting hot. Check your power supply input vents and fan area. Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

Case temperature seemsfine. I have plenty of case fans and have not had any other problems. There is just a problem with the Video Card RAM overheating.

Alright well what ill do is explain why ur card is overheating and then ill tell u what u can do. Ok, the card we're talking abt is the 5950 Ultra, the highest-end card of the 5th series, or FX series of Nvidia GPUs. Since it was released over 3 years ago, it uses an old type of memory called "DDR". the tpye of memory determines how high the memory clock will go and thus how high the memory bandwidth will be, wich is a very important part of the GPU. Now, since Nvidia wanted the highest memory bandwidth for their top-end card, of that time they went abt clocking the memory as high as it would possibly go on the DDR memory, wich got them the performance they wanted but has some consequences, the main one being the heat that the RAM created. So in all, it was Nvidia using the DDR memory to it's MAX in order to get the performance they wanted that made the memory heat up more then it should have. If they had used DDR2 memory for example they could have clocked it the same but with much less heat. So, now that u understand why, ill tell u what u can do: 1. Underclock the RAM on ur card, wich is now at 450Mhz, until u see that the memory is no longer overheating. This is free and can be done very easily, but it will reduce the card's performance. 2. Buy a new graphics card. Nvidia has just released their 7600 GT to the AGP platform, and it stands as one of the best price for performance cards ever. It has all the newest features, including Pixel Shader 3.0 and GDDR3 memory. It will perform several times better then ur card and costs under 150$. Hope i helped.