Problem with new 4870

Recently I purchased a "Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 "Toxic" 512MB GDDR5" and when I play games like counterstrike source, dawn of war 2 or farcry 2 I get severe artifacting all over the place and occasionally crashes. Also when I try to watch a video the screen goes black then comes back on with VPU recover saying the driver stopped responding.

Im not sure what the problem is, is it a faulty piece of hardware or is something in my system breaking it? I have a 550w PSU with 30A on the 12v rail (Is that not sufficient and causing the problem?)

I just loaded up farcry 2 and straight away had artifacts all over the place, the load peaked at 74% and all of the temperatures in gpu-z ranged from around 50-60*c

Those numbers seem good to me. Another possibility is an unstable overclock, so if you're OCing, just do that stability test in CCC.

It could very well just be the driver. If you're already using 9.2, I'd try an earlier version. 8.12 is the most stable for me and what I'm currently using. 8.10 worked really well for me too. So you might have to try your luck there.

Ok thanks ill try some older drivers and if that fails ill go about RMA'ing it. The PSU make is colorsit

I have the exact same video card. Overheating cannot be the problem. The sapphire Toxic is one of coolest running 4870s out there. I mean unless your case has almost no ventalation. As long as you have an intake and an outtake fan the card should be fine. Mine has yet to break 50C. I would say you just have a bad card. I would RMA it. My card works awesome and I have had zero problems with it.