My recently-completed system displayed a distressing tendency to lock up solid for a few minutes, then reboot, when playing 3-D games. This is not the sort of thing you want to have happen after you’ve spent an embarassing amount of money building The Perfect Box.

It turns out that my Asus GeForce 6800 Ultra (which, admittedly, I bought hot out of the oven) appears to have shipped with a BIOS that was one revision from fit for public consumption.

Thank goodness for mvktech.net, which had an updated BIOS, the latest version of the tool for flashing it, and a handy tool, NiBiTor, for examining the BIOS values besides.

Between mvktech, which looks likely to become part of my geek shortlist alongside BoingBoing and Slashdot, and x86-secret.com, which hosts a slew of older nVidia BIOSen, I think I have everything I need to keep my cards running for the foreseeable future.