Strange. I came back from a trip and found my old GeForce4 Ti 4400 graphics card had become flakey. Lots of little boxes all over the monitor, hangs, blue screens, etc. Tried a few things to revive it and swapped components around my machines to make sure it really was the graphics card that was the trouble. I had to pronouce it dead.
I've now replaced it with a Radeon 9800 Pro by Sapphire. Dabs had a lot in stock and it seemed to rate well for the price. I also already had an Arctic Cooler for the Radeon 9x00 series that I hadn't used. I had previously bought it for my Radeon 9700 Pro that had turned out to be incompatible with my Asus P4P800 motherboard. I haven't installed the Artic Cooler yet as the noise from the 9800 doesn't seem too bad.
So the great news is that I can crank up the graphics on Far Cry! I'm also now ready to run Half Life 2.
I also took the opportunity to add another 200Gb to my machine via a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7. It's not the greatest hard disk but it's quiet and good enough for what I need - DVD storage.
Can be quite nice when you're forced to upgrade your PC!