Problem with tower since graphics card died

Hiya,

System specs
Asus p5kpl-cm
Intel E8400 @ stock
2 * 2GB Kingston ddr2 800
Maxtor sata 250GB
IDE DVDRW
IDE CDRW
Tooq X-Power 8000 800W PSU

Original gfx card - Gigabyte Nvidia 1GB pre Overclocked, cant remember exact model now
New gfx card - Asus GTS250 512MB

My friend recently had a problem with this tower when playing CoD that would make it reboot. Over time it got worse and worse until the point the screen was always scrambled, even on the BIOS screen. By the time he asked me to have a look the gfx card fan was not spinning, so I removed the graphics card and using the onboard gfx the screen was correct but Windows XP refused to boot.

We decided that as he needed a new gfx card now would be a good time to upgrade to Windows 7 as well. I installed everything OK without problem and did approx a 16hour stress test with Prime95 and the freestone graphics card stability test - all OK.

About 2 weeks later he rings to say it has restarted a few times while playing the game, sometimes Windows came back up sometimes it didnt. This got worse over the next few weeks, until Windows would no longer load.

Then I decided to reinstall XP and just use the onboard gfx. This all went well, and I did the same stress test for over 24 hours, all OK. But then the next day it refused to start up with a BSOD 0xF4, cant get into safe mode or normal.

I have ran Mem test+ with both sticks of RAM and also with just one for over 24 hours each time and no errors.
I have scanned the hard drive for bad sectors and it passed.
Without just swapping parts out I am not sure where to start�.
Motherboard?
PSU? For info both gfx cards require 1 PCIe power

Any help is much appreciated

If you have another PSU available I would try swapping that out first. The symptoms that you describe could well be down to an inadequate PSU. I couldn't find out much about that Spanish brand other than that no-one has anything good to say about them.

If you can't find a review of a PSU, let alone a good one, there's probably a reason.

I did wonder about the PSU, I live in Tenerife and the choice is limited to say the least. When i was stress testing it with the GTS250 I set Prime95 to max power and never had any problems, so that made me think the PSU might actually be fine.

Im gonna swap it over and try installing XP again with the onboard gfx and see what happens.

Thanks

Ive managed to get this working no problem at all with just a cheap PUS and no gfx card. Im thinking of gettign a new PSU and from the limited selection I have available the ThermalTake Toughpower XT 575W looks pretty good (I have a Thermaltake 450W in my system that has been OC'd for the past 4-5years with no problems).

The graphics card requires 26A on 12V rail, the XT 575W supplies 48A on single 12V rail. Original PSU was 28A on dual 12V rail.
Im assuming its better to have a single 12V rail so the Toughpower XT 575W looks much better to me.

Any thoughts?

I've found that a recently installed, new PCIe Gigabyte brand GeForce 8400GS 1024MB (shared memory) works perfectly in a half height case with only a 300watt PSU that's more than 4 years old. I'm Running XP 32bit with 4GB RAM and 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo CPU.

I would recommend a Gigabyte brand GPU for any set up where there may be doubts about a PSU's performance...

Im back to thinking it could be the gfx card now.
I ran ATI Tool 0.27 - scan for artifacts and after a few minutes I started getting lots of yellow dots across the top of teh screen in a line.
The temperature od the GPU stays around 58-59C
I tried a different gfx card (a much older, less power hungry one) and that produced no artifacts.
Unfortunately I do not have another PSU powerful enough to power the gfx card so can not tell absolutely for sure if its the PSU or gfx card, but surely it must be the gfx card now........