ATI Radeon x1950 - ATI has dropped the support

As I understand, ATI offers more power per buck than NVidia does. And up to the launch of Win7 I will replace the outdated card.
Actually I think the x4770 offer enough power adequate priced (I am not a gamer). Actually you can read just in catalogs on different cards, but noone here in Europe has those card on stock.
Or should I wait until DirectX 11 compiant cards will come out and will be shiped to the masses, mid of Q1 2010?
(Otherwise I will have to replace that card again when Win8 comes out with DirectX 12 and the new driver model wdmi 2.0 or something).
Which are the best manufactures of ATI cards? (Sapphire, HIS, MSI, GigaByte; ASUS, Gainward)

Best Regards, Oblomow

Well, I always will avoid MSI from now on, bcoz the quality sucks and thier manuals sucks (MSI mobo: PM8M-V). Sapphire would be good coz its usually cheap... HSI has their IceQ on some graphic cards... Actually usually no matter what company they all use the same graphic card put their own sticker,box and warranty at it and sell it at a high or low price.... Just see how long is the warranty and the price, that should do, since u aren't a gamer get the HD 4670... I dunno how much you will save but HD 4670 is a good card with the same power (or better with AA) compared to HD 3870. Plus 4670 doesn't have require a PCI-E power plug...

Since my current ASUS Radeon x1950 card (27 month old) has been moved into legacy (=garbage) status by ATI (no valid and working x64 drivers both for Win7 x64 and Vista x64) I purchased a brand new Radeon HD 4770 card.

After physically installing the new card, moving the sound card to a different PCI-slot (free air flow for the new card) both Vista and Win7 each forced me to restart und reboot serveral times (every cycle about 15 minutes each).

Now I have installed Catalyst 9.6 in Win7 x64 Build 7229.

When I now try to send the machine into sleep mode it tries to go asleep (just 3-4 seconds) - Black screen nervious disk operations.

Then the graphic card fan starts surpringly making horrible noise and the system wakes up again immediately.

Definitely that doesn't happen with Radeon x1950 and Catalyst x64 9.1 for Win7.

Windows Vista x64 SP2 sleeps well with the new card.

Does anyone has a tip / workaround to force Win7 to fell asleep and to wakeup without Blue or completely black screens after wakeup?

Thanks in advance

Best Regards

Sincerely yours Oblomow