nVidia were bloody right

The real question would be how many recommended amps on the 12v rail are required for the GTS, and how many did your Hiper have?

Yeah, you were cuttin is close. At least that 8800 will make a good paperweight.

hm, yeah, either that ocz 600 or THERMALTAKE W0103RE 600W 14CM FAN W/ PFC....one of them should be enough, what the heck...

...how on earth did you think there was a problem with you PSU when your UPS was giving a warning? You're trying to draw too much power from your UPS. Reduce load on your UPS or buy a new UPS that supports larger load.

Try moving your monitor and other peripherals off the UPS or buy a more efficient PSU.

Your PSU is probably fine but most of the advice given about PSUs by others in this thread is sound and worth checking into. However, it won't solve your problem. Your PSU didn't switch off or die due to an overload condition, your UPS complained about having too large of a load on it.

The sheer amount of idiocy necessary for everyone in this thread to ignore the obvious problem simply astounds me. In a room full of various computer components only one of them is reporting an error condition... it might be the component that has something wrong with it.

teach me: what is a ups?? :?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unint [...] wer_supply

Uninterruptible Power Supply

aka "battery backup"

The wikipedia article I linked above seems to give a decent overview. The picture they have is the type that we're talking about here.

Uninterruptible Power Supply that he has his PSU (comp power supply) plugged in to.

Oh just to late

Ah well

If that 650 in your "Quantex 650x" stands for volt-amps (I couldn't find it online?), then chances are your UPS (not to be confused with PSU) is only good for 390 W or less. Your 450 W PSU will actually pull somewhere between 500 and 560 W out of the wall, depending on its efficiency. If it says "85% efficiency", then divide the max power (450 W) by the efficiency (85%) to get the outlet power consumed (in this example, about 530 W). The 80 "missing" watts in this example were lost to inefficiencies in the PSU and are transformed into heat and fan rotation.

That max outlet power should be considered a bare minimum for your UPS rating, and only then if you have nothing else (such as a monitor !) plugged into the UPS. Even if your UPS is 650 Watts (again, I can't find it online), if you have anything else plugged into it (e.g. your monitor), you'll likely overload it. If it's 390 W, you'll overload it pretty badly and pretty easily with nothing more than your computer.

For a computer drawing ~550 W out of the wall, coupled with a 100 W LCD screen, you'll want a UPS good for 750 W. I have a 600 W PSU (= max ~700 W outlet power, though I never actually use anywhere near that much) and a 300 W LCD HDTV plugged into a 1200 W (2000 VA) UPS. This gives me enough headroom that I don't have to worry about maxing the UPS out, and also gives me a little more time to shut things down before I lose all power.

Ultra has a 900 W / 1500 VA model that might work for you. It all depends on what else you plug into the thing.

EDIT: Correction. If your UPS is in fact rated for 650 W (not the same as VA, since they're sinusoidal), you're only using a small monitor (100 W or less), your PSU's efficiency is 80% or greater, and nothing else is plugged into the UPS' battery-backed outlets, then you should be ok in theory.

wow...i am out for like one hour and a half and I come back to find a river of information ...I'll move the monitor, subwoofer and printer to another plug and see what happens...
I should add that with the UPS out of the question and the computer plugged directly to the wall, I could play NFS Carbon easily, but after quitting the game it just froze...nothing worked...no ctrl+alt+del, no nothing... i had to restart it from the button...I hate that...

Corsair 520 powers my rig. No problems whatsoever with an eVga 8800 GTS 640, 6600 cpu, 2 Gig ram, 250 Gig SATA WD, 1 Optical drive - and runs cool! Solid rails!