Did my PSU fry my video card?

[Dstoop]

Sorry for the cross post from the GPU forum, but I guess this is more of a PSU question anyway and I seriously don't want a faulty PSU to blow out a second video card on me.

System specs:

i5 3570K (still running @ stock)
8gb Corsair Vengeance RAM
Crucial m4 256G
OCZ ModXtream 700W modular PSU
Corsair H80 cooler
MSI Radeon HD7870 2GB HAWK edition

I just built the rig 2 weeks ago. I started out having some bluescreen DRIVER POWER FAILURE errors occasionally when waking the computer up from the "automatically turn off monitor after 10 minutes" state (sleep and hibernate are totally disabled). I also had some issues where while in that state, i'd catch the GPU cooler awkwardly spinning a spin or two and stopping over and over again until I kicked it out of idle.

I didn't really stress the system until over the weekend where I sat down and played some Guild Wars 2 for a little over 3 hours. Right up to the point where my computer hard crashed, suddenly and completely powering off. It wouldn't even POST anymore, when you hit the power button the fans just sort of made half a spin and immediately shut back down. I started pulling parts one by one and found that if the video card was plugged into the motherboard the system would refuse to start. Tested the card in another system and that system does the same thing. Tested another older video card in the new rig and it POSTs just fine, so the 7870 is definitely toasted and is already on its way back to newegg for an RMA. My concern is whether all these issues were just a faulty video card kicking off once it was finally pressed for a few hours (granted, GW2 only had it running at about 60% utilization since I had vsync on), or if a faulty PSU was causing the DRIVER POWER bluescreens, odd fan behavior while idle, and ultimately fried the card out. With my limited PSU troubleshooting experience I feel like it could go either way :/

Thanks!

 

[oynaz]

I give 90%+ chance of the video card being the culprit. They are far more prone to failure than PSUs.

 

[Dstoop]

I give 90%+ chance of the video card being the culprit. They are far more prone to failure than PSUs.

Yeah, I agree, i'm just a little paranoid on this one 🙂 This whole build was a nightmare from day one. Motherboard shipped with no mounting screws included, I somehow managed to get a few dots of TIM in one of the DIMMs which was a huge pain to clean out, needed an extension for the processor power because of the bottom mounted PSU (it was literally like half an inch too short ><) which I had to drive 2 hours to the nearest microcenter to get and then accidentally ended up in the easypass lane coming back and got hammered with a $30 toll for not having a turnpike ticket, had my new Logitech G600 crap out after two days, and now the video card went.

By now I should've just payed the markup for a custom shop to have built, tested, and OCed the whole thing for me!

 

[Fallengod]

Normally PSU's dont cause other hardware to fail unless its really a piece of garbage, though I have seen it happen with old units going bad. My guess would also be that the vid card just died, but obviously its hard to know for sure not looking at the system or knowing how it was put together.

With that said, I personally would never run an OCZ power supply in my system.

 

[tweakboy]

Its your video card. Its not the PSU. Ive got experience with this. go to BIOS and read your PSU voltages. as long as 12v says 12.xxxv and 5v is 4.9 or 5v then its not your PSU. Your PSU didn't suddenly die. The video card died on you IMO. Put another video card in that computer to make sure of this. gl