Crashes and artifacts caused by weak PSU? (7300 GT)

[funkanorak]

I've just bought a new Geforce 7300 GT and it's being annoying. It works fine in Windows and with 2d apps. But when I try HL2 and Oblivion it crashes quite regularly. The game will slow to a crawl, the screen will fill up with black and grey irregular shapes (sometimes with textures from the game) and force me to close the game with Task Manager. This usually happens within about thirty seconds of walking around. A couple of times it hasn't happened at all and I've been able to play for an hour and quit the game with no crashes or anything. Also, I've had the infinite loop error twice, not as frequently as the usual crashes.

I've updated the drivers but that didn't help.

My suspicion is that the PSU isn't giving sufficient power... it's a generic 300W model and several years old. It has to power 2 HDDs and a DVD drive. Would these type of crashes be caused by lack of power? If so, what sort of replacement power supply would it need?

Any help or wisdom would be most welcome

 

[fender22]

I do believe that the power requirement is 350W power supply with 18A (at least by eVGA) Also could be a driver issue, maybe a bad card? I'm no expert But doesn't quite sound like PSU to me.. I'd get a new one anyhow.. To me.. it says drivers.... do you ever get it while not gaming? Do you have another system you could try the card in?

Edit.. With these artifacts and stuff it does sound like a bad card too...

 

[gramps]

Im no expert but have had video card problems, which from help from people on this forum, turns out to be bad videocard RAM.
I have a 400W Antec PSU (which many would say is pretty small) but I have a lot of gear in my machine - 4HDD, 2DVD, 7900GT(oc), H20pump, fans galore, and have never had an issue with lack of power.
As I said, my vid card is dying (and I did wonder if it was from lack of power, but I know now its not) and I get smeared textures going to nowhere, or coloured triangles, sometimes dots, when playing 3D stuff (esp Oblivion and FarCry), and usually a reset within 5 minutes (or some other type of crash).
Take a look at http://www.playtool.com/pages/artifacts/artifacts.html and see if your problems look similar - mine is kinda like the Vid RAM artifacts.
If this is the problem you can return (RMA) it (if you still have your reciept - dammit, I didn't keep mine!!).
Hope this was of help.

 

[funkanorak]

:idea:

Thanks a lot for the replies It turns out that my PSU is fine. After taking a look at the playtool site (thanks Gramps) I followed the troubleshooting guide... I haven't had any crashes since I turned off AGP 8x in the BIOS. An amusingly simple solution since I've been trying for days to fix this, but I'm glad to have done so eventually. Thanks again!