Radeon 4670 or PSU not functioning properly?

[milanis]

I was going to say your PSU. The fact that you didn't give us a brand name tells us it was probably a low-quality PSU, which can cause problems and even damage your hardware. So let this be another lesson: Your PSU is not like the gas in a car, it's like the oil.

I'll have that in mind when building a new rig slash196! And thanks Termie!

 

[Dark Shroud]

Interesting - good to hear that they fixed it for you. After all of our discussion, I honestly thought it was a graphics card problem (despite my initial hunch that multiple VGA failures could only mean one thing - bad PSU). If it's working fine and the only thing they changed was the power supply, that old PSU must have been really messed up. I've never heard of a PSU leading to overheating graphics cards, just crashes (due to insufficient amps). It must have had some pretty bad voltage regulation.

Anyway, congrats on the working system.

I actually had a similar problem with a generic PSU and an x1950. Now I'm on a HD 4670 as well with a Tigerdirect house brand PSU (Ultra). Normally I'm Corsair only but it's an older system that I don't care to sink much money into.

 

[netxzero64]

Recently I've changed my faulty radeon hd4670 for another one. I've also added another hdd. Then lately games like PoP: The Forgotten Sands and Starcraft 2 have started crashing with a grayish/blackish screen with vertical lines and irritating noise. Only the hard reset helps then. I've run some test and concluded that this happens only during prolonged graphically demanding scenes when fps drop below 25fps. If I lower the graphics settings everything runs ok without crashes. I finished PoP with just few crashes somewhere in the middle of the game, while in other parts of it there were none. Same with SC2. Games crash after 2 or 5 or 10 minutes or not at all depending on the above.
I could easily sacrifice visuals for the safety, but still I'd like to know if it's the PSU or the GPU causing the crashes. Any ideas?

AMD Phenom X4 9550 2.21 Ghz
Asus M2N68 Plus
Kingston 3GB (2+1) DDR2 RAM @800Mhz
Radeon 4670 128-bit 512MB GDDR3
2 HDDs
PSU 450w
Win7 Ultimate 32-bit

Yeah, drivers, directx etc are up to date.

check the GPU temps when gaming... and also if the GPU fan is spinning.. i had a similar situation back then and the culprit was that the GPU was overheating