i got mine around march and rma'ed it last week.

Same here

Mine was of the April bunch and I received it in May. The screen shots you showed above (especially the web) was exactly what mine was doing. It got worse if you kept rolling the scroll bar up and down fast. I knew it was something that I had to get fixed right away and so I rma'd it. No problems since and I am going on almost three months now.

When I started having problems, I did the "loosen the screws" bit, completely cleaned it out with spray air and other items. Just could not find a solution. Oh well, definitely happy now.

Forgot to mention (and can't figure out if I can re-edit my post). When my problems started, I had to seriously downclock my system. And even after awhile, that was causing the artifacting as well.

Wanted to share that in case someone has done this and thinks this has solved their problem. Thanks.

Mine is of the March edition with the old screen. I RMA'ed it two weeks ago and it will be arriving today. Unfortunately, I'm in Bahrain until the 4th, and won't have a chance to play with it until then. As a side note, Sager claims to have replaced just about everything (unwillingly as they still claim there is nothing wrong with it according to their tests). Power supply was "fine," but I made them replace it anyway; the motherboard was replaced, a hard drive was replaced, and Windows 2003 was installed?; and the Bios was updated.

So, even though "nothing was wrong with it" a lot of major components were replaced. I can't wait to see which parts were actually replaced.

I saw some minor artifacts a couple months ago, then didnt play 3D games for a while. Now I load up HL2 and see artifacts! Omegadrivers didn't help, and removing the screws on the metal plate under the keyboard didn't help either. The top surface of that metal plate itself was not dirty so I didn't clean it.

Is there anything else I can try? It'll be a big pain if I have to send it back, because I'm overseas right now.

Unfortunatley I have joined your sad group of artifacting 8790's. I recieved mine in august and it is now beginning to artifact and run at temps like 60+ gaming... which is very unusual. I am going to do the standard cleaning, but I am also considering an RMA... which will be the most likely of actions. The only problem is that I am at college right now and need a computer . I have not done any major overclocking 470/280 and that was only for about a week. So I am very upset and dissappointed to have my awsome laptop now become a general use computer .

Welcome to the club

I guess I also am joining the club. I'm using the latest omega drivers running at stock, and am getting quite a bit of artifacting. I tried reverting back to old omega drivers but it's still happening.

on a lighter note, however, when I turned it on, artifacts were gone. I played 2 games of artifact-free UT2K4.

Ordered mine right away when they became available. Got it in March. As I stated in another thread I RMA'd mine and got it back Jan 14 2005. My screen issue is fixed but as soon as I got it back and powered it on I started having Windows internal system errors and now I'm having ATI driver failures as well. I am working with support to resolve those issues.

What's the best way to monitor temps? Is there something available in free ware or do I need to buy software?

I'm wondering if you just need to reformat/reinstall. My system seemed a bit gummed up after a mb replacement from Clevo (still haven't had the time to do reformat mine- haven't had time to play games, either ).

As for temp monitor, most ev'one here seems to use MobMeter/MobileMeter. A quick Googling ought to come up w/ a link. Or search the forums and you'll eventually find a link.

Sager asked me to update my video BIOS, and when that didnt work, asked me to send it in for repair. I might wait until I get back to the US before doing this, as it will still be under 1-year warranty -- I need my laptop for work and the 3D problems don't affect the rest of it.

Seemed like I got lucky. I had artifacting problems so I sent it to Sager and got it back on the 24th of December and haven't had a single problem since I got it back. I figured they would've wiped the HD clean, but they just replaced the mobo and sent it back to me. No Windows errors, driver problems, etc. Games all run smoother and the whole process was a breeze (minus not having a laptop for 2 weeks). Just don't want anything to happen to it again or I might be slightly more peeved. Bought mine back in July, running new mobo bios and latest Sager drivers (8.04 i guess)

Add my 18-month-old 8890 to the list of severely artifacting compies. I'm in the UK, so RMAing isn't an option, but a Clevo warehouse has already replaced my mobo once (last summer, when it was still under warranty). Looks like I'll be heading back to them, but I'm not liking the idea of how much a new mobo will cost outside of warranty...