Restarts with XFX 7900GS

It could be an issue with power; what power supply are you using?

It could also be an issue with the card overheating.

Sounds to me like your power supply is going bad or just getting old.

What are your system specs?

You said: "Removing the card gets rid of the problem." Explain further, specifically what video card are you using instead?

Ok, i think it's your power supply and here's my reasoning:

you said that you have a 350W power supply with 25A on the 12V rail

Either this is a typo or your adding together two or more 12V rails into one which is not always accurate. In this case it's just plain impossible (assuming i did my math correctly). Assuming a 75% efficient power supply, which is generous since I would bet that yours it is closer to 65%:

350W*0.75-2=262.5W of available power

Assuming that you could use all of that power at 12V (which you can't) that would give you:

262.5W/12V=21.875A total amps to spread across the 12V rails.


I seriously doubt your getting the required 20A across your 12V rails, you were probably running your PSU at near 100% load for over a year and a half and i think it just can't keep up anymore. This recently happened to me, i had an old 400W power supply and eventually after several years it couldn't keep up with the 6600GT i had in that system and would cause the whole system to just lock up.



No sense in spending more money on a new power supply until you're sure though. You might try to disable Aero, this may cause the graphics chip to use less power when not gaming causing vista to be more stable. Check your graphics card temps using Speedfan ( http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php3 ) or if that doesn't work for you then try the "NVIDIA System Tools" ( http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidi [...] _6.03.html )

Just to make sure you could try a different power supply if you have one available or alternatively try your card in another system.

That's true, guess i just got carried away with the math... However I was under the impression that this was only true of very high quality manufacturers such as PC Power and Cooling? or was i mistaken? I guess the best way to know is to look at the label... So in retrospect i suppose it is possible to get 25A on a 12V rail from a 350W power supply but that still doesn't mean you can always add the amps together fully from seperate rails.

Regardless it still sounds overwhelmingly likely to me that this is a power supply problem do you agree? However It could still be a bad graphics card (or even a bad motherboard i suppose) so try to verify the problem before spending more money.

either the psu or grpahics card probably has a blown capacitor or stuffed mosfets..