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New Sapphire 5770 Issues

Last response: in Systems
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Alright, so I ordered a new Sapphire 5770 for my rig, and first I have to admit that I ordered the very cheapest one I could find which may have been a bad idea on it's own... Here it is on Newegg (where I ordered it from): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
And when I first got this I ordered it with a C2Q, the Q8400, and I was very excited to get the new GPU in but I didn't want to go to the trouble of replacing the CPU just yet. So I replaced my old GPU and my rig was as follows:
Video: Sapphire 5770
Proc: E2180
Ram: 4GB(2x2) of DDR3
Mobo: Gigabyte EP45T-USB3P
Hard Drives: 2 SATA, 1 IDE
Disc drives: 2 SATA
Fans: 3 120mm LED, 2 80mm
And my PSU is an HX520W Corsair...

Before I ordered my stuff I looked it up on here: http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp
and everything seemed alright even when I put my Q8400 OCed and two 5770s in Crossfire along with the rest of my system. But long story short, everything is very unstable, and has gotten worse since last night when I put the Q8400 in. I can't OC this GPU at all (even though my friend's XFX 5770 maxes out Overdrive's settings easy) and even on stock it crashes sometimes. To get it semi-stable I had to under-clock the CPU, by the way, at first I thought this instability might also be affect by the fact that, due to some unfortunate circumstances, I have had to use the stock cooler but even that should be stable.
I also want to mention that sometimes when it crashes the CPU is on full load but the GPU is hardly doing anything. And it acts like the kind of GPU crashes I get where the screen just freezes on something and you have to restart.
Now, to me this sounds like a PSU problem, but as I may have accidentally revealed I'm probably a newbie by most people's standards, and I want to ask the opinion of someone a little more... smart. So, thanks in advance to anyone who responds.

Oh, by the way the PSU is probably about 4-5 years old and I'm not the original owner, I'm not sure if the age makes a difference.

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wielander said:
I would be surprised if this was a PSU problem. The HD 5770 only draws ~17W at idle, likely less than whatever you replaced. The graphics card is probably defective.


That's what I read but I thought maybe since my PSU's old... Or maybe that's irrelevant... I'm not sure.
But do you think I should send it back to Newegg, I mean, I want to ask you if you're sure but that seems like it's not a fair question since you aren't here looking at my rig... It's just I live overseas at an APO address so I don't have long to ship the thing back and I don't know what to do. I'm probably a bit panicky.
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wielander said:
Put the old graphics card back in (easy enough to do) and try it out. If the problems you are having go away, it's definitely the HD 5770.


Oh, right... and you're right by the way, the old draws a lot more power... just looked it up. I must remember Google is my friend before I start posting. Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.
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sileb13 said:
That's what I read but I thought maybe since my PSU's old... Or maybe that's irrelevant... I'm not sure.

PSUs do degrade in performance over time (it's called capacitor aging), but it's a slow process and happens over a long period of time. I can't imagine that power supply degrading enough to be causing a problem with your system. It's also really unlikely that your power supply would start to fail the exact moment you upgraded components.

Alright, so after messing around with some stuff and stress testing my CPU a little I figured I would follow your advice and just put the old card back in... By the way, that card is an EVGA 8800 GTS. And I opened up Crysis Warhead, a game that before it could run pretty decent and which I have never had it crash on, even after overclocking. However, it crashed after about 10 minutes, just like the other card. It wasn't a blue screen either, everything just froze like when my new one crashed. I noticed it was at 75 degrees C when it crashed but I know that's a safe, albeit high, temperature and I'm pretty sure that's typical on this card when I run stuff like Crysis.

did u change your OC settings on the CPU? run the CPU in Stock and see if the problom presists.. if every thing is ok in Stock, then OC, also remember to lock the PCI-E on 100MHz in your bios
as far as I remember, Q8400 is not OC friendly..

pcworm said:
did u change your OC settings on the CPU? run the CPU in Stock and see if the problom presists.. if every thing is ok in Stock, then OC, also remember to lock the PCI-E on 100MHz in your bios
as far as I remember, Q8400 is not OC friendly..

The Q8400 is not stable at all with the stock cooler which, as I said, I have been forced to use. And I have not even thought about overclocking with this cooler, I did however try to underclock and I went all the way down to 2GHz then figured it wasn't worth it since it's not reaching dangerous temps. Plus, since I last posted anything I did try running Prime95 and it took about 10 minutes to blue screen. I think at the high point, when it crashed, the cores were at about 65C which according to real temp is not the max... but it bugs me a little that that says it's safe to 100C when it clearly can't operate that hot. I'm figuring as far as the CPU goes it's just a heat issue and I'm already looking into buying a nice V6 cooler.
I will check the PCI-E speed but I've never messed with that so I don't see why it would causing me problems.

Thank's for the reply.
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