Tom's Hardware does a monthly (or close to monthly) round up of the best performing video cards at certain price thresholds, which is often an invaluable resource.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-card-geforce-radeon,2646-3.html

That's the June one.

However, they do aim almost entirely on performance in these round ups, sometimes feature sets are considered as well where relevant, but they don't look at long term reliability and other such things. To find out that, will likely need to look at the pricepoint you're interested in, find the model, then go take a look around the place and see (via Google!) if there are any widespread issues with the chip, or specific brands of the card, etc.

As for a personal reccomendation, I couldn't be happier with the nVidia GTX260, it'll be within the price range you're looking at and performs beautifully.

In terms of trying to resolve the issue you're having now.. Can look at doing a complete driver wipe (ATI has a tool you can download and run from Windows Safemode, I believe) then do a clean install of the latest drivers and the like, but the problems you're explaining sound more like bad memory modules on the card itself, and there isn't really a lot you can do about that.

Of course, it's possible it's also just overheating. In which case, could try RivaTuner/SpeedFan to monitor it, then see if you can either crank up the fanspeed if that is the case, or even apply a small underclock to resolve if you can't or it isn't sufficient.

But yeah.. That is a pretty.. um.. not great card you have at the moment. So an upgrade wouldn't really do ya any harm anyhow.

If it still persists through a new graphics card, might want to load up memtest86 and let it do a few cycles of that, see if there are any issues with your RAM chips as well.

Yes actually. Considering my current card is acting up, I'd like to upgrade it (also to get better performance for DoWII).

i build desktop rigs for people every day. i admit i don't work on laptops. i own one but somebody has been borrowing it for over 2 years. i also own a netbook but couldn't tell you where it is at the moment.

is it possible to upgrade the gpu in a laptop? i thought all laptop gpu's were onboard.

Unfortunately I've been unable to open the case so I can get at the fan like I want to. Additionally I've been unable to determine what my PSU wattage is.

I did however manage to gather some data on my graphics card:

GPU- RS780M
Shaders- 40 Unified
DirectX Support- DX10, Shader Model 4.0 (SM4.0)
Memory Size- 320 MB (128 MB is required for DoWII)
Default Clock- 500 MHz
Memory- 333 MHz

GPU-Z gives "0 MHz" as the GPU Clock and Memory values. Which I find odd.

SpeedFan right now is telling me that my HD0 temp is about 37 degrees Celsius, with "Temp1" (I'm guessing it's remote or GPU) at 57C and Core at 55C. Temp1 and Core fluctuate around that area.

UPDATE- temperatures topped out in the 170-179 Fahrenheit range (I switched it to that instead of Celsius as I can gauge Fahrenheit better). For reference previous temperatures are guessed in the 130-140 Fahrenheit range. Mostly because that's what my computer is idling at about right now.

Also, I've decided to religiously employ the fan I own. It seems to be helping tremendously, as I was able to get through 2 rounds of The Last Stand gamemode in DoWII. Though it doesn't have quite as much going on as the campaign.

You're screwed I have an HP dv9700t laptop, the model before yours, and one screen-size bigger. The video card is an Nvidia GeForce 8600M 512MB. Last October, thanks to the wonderful construction of that card and great design decisions on HP's part, it overheated and started to melt, and took out the motherboard in the process. Cost $400 to repair it, and they replaced it with the same defective graphics card.

Before it crapped out entirely, I experienced problems similar to yours. When I was playing games or doing something graphics intensive, the screen would go all screwy. Sometimes it went black, sometimes grey, sometimes a mess of colors. I would wait a couple seconds, and I would be at my desktop, game crashed, and a little bubble in the corner saying something along the lines of "The graphics card has suffered a problem, but has recovered." Eventually these crashes happened more and more frequently, until it blue screened, and then it just didn't start, period (but I could start it in safe mode, which is weird, but that let me copy all of my data).

So, my advice; if you have an external hard drive or something, back everything up, just in case. In the future, don't get anything with a GeForce 8600, it is a known defect that Nvidia has chosen to ignore. As already mentioned, put it on a flat surface, and raise it on something, or get one of those big cooling fans. Hopefully some of that helps...

Topping out at 70-80C though isn't indicative of any heat issues if those values are indeed correct for the card.  I don't use ATI but if you can find a program like EVGA Precision which lets you control fan speeds on the fly, you could test if you no longer have problems while playing after cranking up the fans.  I hear some good things about RivaTuner.

Really though, it's pretty dubious that those temps are causing such issues at least from my experience.  Multiple games crapping out as you say sounds more like a dying card.

I have a nice cooling fan and also am pretty sure that it blackscreens at around the 190's Fahrenheit. Or maybe the 200's, somewhere up there. I've found that it doesn't blackscreen nearly as often with the fan on, which is nice.

I may have to try that. Problem is on high performance power mode I'm thinking I'll drain the battery REALLY fast.

Well, what I'm thinking is that my card isn't so much as dying as just overheating too often. At least I hope to God it isn't dying. Mirror's Edge is probably the most graphics intensive game I've ever played besides DoWIIGold and Shattered Horizon, as it only ever happened once with Dark Crusade (after I'd been playing some DoWII, so that may have contributed), and the UDK incidences I can ascribe the the May build being a bit buggy and also using the new Scaleform UI (which may not play too nice with my system ATM).

Core seems to fluctuate more, so I'm guessing it's my processor and Temp1 is the video card. Especially since Temp1 seems to be the one that cools down far slower.

I have found however, that if I let my laptop sleep with the fan on, that DOES help it cool down. Playing only 1-3 missions of DoWII and then shutting it down and doing something else for a few minutes also lets it cool down a bit.

The only good thing I can think of if my card dies is that I can maybe get a better one.

Your best solution is to wait for ATI's XGP solution to be released somewhere around when Dude Nuke 'em will be. It's an external plug-and-play graphic card that sits in a box that you can put in Desktop video cards in (even 2 and crossfire them!) then it redirects the output back to your monitor or an external screen if you would like. 

The techonology was developed late '08 and there are a few technical demoes of it floating around. ATI has the technology developped. However, the only notebook manufacture the special port it required when the Alpha Version came out was Samsung, so it wasn't well-accepted.

They ended up redoing it and currently it can work with the special port found on ATI Radeon 3000 HD series notebook video cards (my Sony FW Vaio has it). There is also a mini-PCI card that provides the given port.

There was another rumor around the internet at large that they may be re-releasing the technology to be more publically available again this Summer, and shipping it with a 5850 video card to start with (which is a very nice $200 one. I have two of them in my main desktop in a CrossFire and I can play DoW II across multiple monitors at the top-of-the-line graphics level with full auto-aliasing and I've only met one person out of roughly 100 online games who loads the game faster than me (though that is mostly because I have a SSD).

You too could do this because it should have 2 slots. You can also share it between a notebook and a desktop (have both devices plug into it) and then you can actually upgrade "both" without having to buy new video cards for both. The box is also pretty small, though it does require a power source, I think. 

It costed $300-350 before, but it shipped with a crappy card (~$100). So if they ship it with a nice card, probably 350-400 since I'm sure the technology they use to make the magic boxes is cheaper now.t

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_XGP

http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/ati-xgp/Pages/ati-xgp.aspx