Note that Sapphire only has a 2 year warranty. Recently The Sapphire card I bought before BD came out died suddenly (a game locked up, and the computer failed to POST trying to reboot) 2 years and a month after I bought it. There is no grace period on the warranty.
I replaced the card with a similar Gigabyte model. Their warranty is 3 years parts, 2 years labour, based on the date of manufacture. I don't know if they have some grace period if you have a receipt to prove when you bought it (my date of purchase is 3 months after the date of manufacture), but hopefully that will not be an issue.
My choice of replacements locally were limited to either Sapphire or Gigabyte (the few online places I checked either didn't carry older AGP models or had them way over-priced).
