NVIDIA GTS 450 / hardware problems

[msalmon217]

I was recently running an NVIDIA GTS 450 card with an ASUS P7H55 motherboard (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131623), an I5 2.67 GHZ processor, and a raidmax 530W power supply. I ran it flawlessly for almost two months until I started getting a few nasty forced restarts, which ultimately led to not getting past the windows welcome screen. I reformatted and reinstalled windows 7 and tried reinstalling the nvidia card with the same freezing results at the opening windows screen. I put my old radeon 5450 card and it is now working fine and I tried the GTS 450 in a friends pc and it still worked. I have consoled with another tech friend of mine and we have narrowed it down to either a problem with a bad hard drive or negligent power supply. Any thoughts or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

 

[nforce4max]

Hard drives don't produce these symptoms even in the worst of times. As for the psu raidmax is trash and they produce terrible units.

 

[Meatymutawings]

5450 draws less power than th 450 is why
get a new psu.

 

[legendkiller]

I am not sure if it's PSU fault but it may be something else, PSU will immediately shutdown if not enough power(After 2-3 seconds of it being on) and wouldn't freeze/BSOD... It could be a GTs 450 and either MoBo or CPU problem that isn't working together with the GTs 450 lol...

 

[msalmon217]

The motherboard is brand new and the CPU / windows is running flawlessly after putting in the 5450. All of my bios are loaded and processing properly so I can't see how the motherboard could be malfunctioning.

 

[msalmon217]

Bought a 700 W corsair PSU unit and windows crashes at the opening windows logo where the screen tears a bit then turns into a nasty grey screen of death. Dead graphics card? :/

 

[nforce4max]

Card or the ram. RMA the card and on the side run memtest to to rule out the ram but keep the psu. A good psu is always a good investment.

 

[msalmon217]

Best answer selected by msalmon217.