4850 +12v Rail

I recently purchased a Sapphire 4850, the dual slot edition to replace my 7950 and I played GoW on high for about 30 minutes to an hour and closed that out and started COD4, running both maxxed and my monitor went black then my system crashed and I smelt probably the smell of my psu burning, Now I closed my heat vent and have been keeping my room at about outside temps and no crashes since. I monitored my +12v rails while playing Crysis on high and the voltages would dip to 11.5-11.6 and in COD4 it would dip to 11.6-11.9 my question is when I purchase a new PSU will I see an increase in performance since my 4850 isn't getting full juice IDK if .4v is really gonna improve performance just curious.

what kind of PSU do you have? What is your config more precisely?

I have a more power hungry system and as you can see i have only a 470w (only 29 amps on the +12V) PSU and never had a problem. So i dont think that your psu is causing problem only if its defective. I had silimar problem when I overclocked my HD4850 too much. Is your card factory oced or have you oced it? If you put new copponents into the comp and stress them you can oftenly like something is burning. After a few days the smell will go away. I experienced this with multiple computers. The droop in voltage at the 12v is pretty bad you have there, yes it can cause instabilityes and crashes but i highly doubt that getting a better psu will increase the performance of your rig.


Intel Core™2 Quad Q9300 2500 MHz clocked 3000 MHz (1.225v bios);
Gigabyte EP45-DS3R with Thermalright HR-05 SLI/IFX;
DIMM 4*2Gb DDR2 PC-6400 800MHz Corsair matched XMS2 with DHX Technology (clocked to 960 Mhz at 1.80v;
HDD SEAGATE 500 Gb 7200 rpm, 32 Mb cache, SATA 3Gb/s, NCQ;
DVD SAMSUNG S-ATA, BulkDL: +/-8x, RAM: +14x, DVDR: +/-20x, DVDRW: +8x/-6x, CD-R/RW/ROM: 48x/32x/48x;
Gigabyte ATI HD 4850 with Accelero S1 + Turbo module;
CASE Case Raidmax Katana;
Power Supply Thermaltake 470W TR2 W0089RE;

Lol ok good, yeah it was oc'd but I took the oc off after it crashed. Ha ha never knew new components have that new burnt smell

Would you say it would be safe to OC my cpu, Im sure it's bottlenecking my system cause in small crysis maps I can easily set the settings to high but in larger maps if I spectate and swap players there is huge lag.

ATM my e4500 is stock and when under 100% load only gets to about 45C with fan set to 100%