The flicker issue has been resolved and was due to my own negligence. ATI recommends both connectors but based on reading a lot of threads, fixing the flickering can also be achieved by only connecting a single CF connector. Unfortunately I had connected the one farthest from the external DVI connector which apparently also causes the flickering (didn’t read it but was fixed by moving it to the front). In haste of installation I didn’t go back over it. So that’s been corrected and it’s running great in all but UT3. UT3 is now running longer but eventually locks up. While I’d like to blame the driver/UT3 I think it’s something else like load on the PSU which should be able to handle the load. I only say this because when this is about to occur I hear, what I believe to be, my UPS beep several times and in a short time the game locks. What I find odd is that this occurs in no other game or at no other time. The system runs rock solid outside of UT3 and shows no issues before the beeps in it. I’ve not had any issues in Frontlines like this either and it is running on the Unreal engine. The only thing I can think of is that it’s the speed of UT3 as compared to other games I play(?). I’ve also not noticed it in Crysis but I’ve not gotten into any games that are nearly as heavy as TDM/Warfare on UT3. However, I’ve also ran 3DMark06 several times in a row without the issue.

The only other thing I’m going to take a look at this weekend is voltage and do some CPU stress tests. I am running the E6600 at 3GHz using one of the OC profiles so my first test will probably be tweaking the voltage and FSB on the P5W DH OC menus. I’ve been happy with the 2.4-3.0GHz boost on air so really not tried individual tweaks to push it to the 3.2-3.6GHz range that people have said is possible with good cooling like my Tuniq tower. I’ll probably do that tomorrow and bring it back down to 2.4GHz tonight and try UT3 since that’s the easiest starting point.

The other interesting thing I found was that the Catalyst drivers don’t include everything for the HD cards even though the download is specific to the 3870′s.  I found this out by having my video not working on everything in Media Player.  After checking codecs (which included standard WMV), I ended up (for the first time that I can recall) installing from the CD and then updating the card to Catalyst 8.3 which still makes me wonder if there are other updates I’m missing.  I disable the audio since it kills the default audio.