Small PC Upgrade Help?

[AbdullahG]

My current PC is an HP Pavilion Magnesium Gray Edition p6654y. I plan on upgrading the CPU to an AMD Phenom II X4 945 Deneb Core 3.0GHz Processor and the GPU to a EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Superclocked video card. I had a bad experience with using a reference Nvidia Geforce GTX 560 Ti for my PC. It caused 2 BSODs in one day(returned it the same day). I think it might have been bottlenecking my CPU. So, should I go with the upgrade? I'm afraid I'll have the same issue with the non-reference card. If so, what Radeon HD card would you recommend that is of equal or greater performance than the GTX 560 Ti? By the way, I use my PC for gaming, school work, and everyday tasks, just so you know. My budget for the CPU and GPU is $670 (I don't want to spend ALL of it).

 

[geofelt]

You may need a psu upgrade also.

The GTX560Ti needs 500w with 30a on the 12v rails plus two 6-pin PCI-E power leads.

Most pre built pc's come with a psu only strong enough to power the original configuration.

BSOD could be a number of reasons:
Insufficient power, driver problem, defective unit.
But being "bottlenecked" by a slow cpu is not one of them.

A amd card equivalent to the GTX560Ti might be the 6950.

 

[AbdullahG]

I actually have a 600W PSU, so that's no issue (now that I think about it, the BSODs probably were caused by overloading my PC with so many tasks at one time). I'm still wondering if I should try my luck with the 560 Ti (not going to try the GTX 570 or 580; too much power consumption).