Sorry, mistake on my side: The new VIC number is of course 8565. Do you have the possibility to try one, even if borrowed?
I mean, you seem to have really bad luck with the monitors an converters you're choosing. That TV that switches to Secam, converters that don't get the colour right - such a bad picture would have been caught in our QC, which every single board needs to pass before it even gets the warranty ID.
Before you blame the board (and cause enormous shipping cost from the other side of the planet), I suggest to go with the simplest-possible approach and use a classic C64 monitor or something that has a genuine S-Video input, not an adapter, because, again, all the adapters that you can get on eBay and Amazon are based on the same low-end chipset that doesn't work properly in the first place.
