Re: New gfx card caused some issues with power cutting out

Hello all

I recently purchased a new graphics card for my pc so that my new favourite mmorpg Guild Wars 2 would run with better frame rate.

With this aim in mind I did a little research by reading some tech reviews of graphics cards and settled upon a KFA2 GeForce GTX 660ti 3096mb GDDR5 which I purchased from overclockers.co.uk and arrived promptly the next day.

My pc specs up until that point:

Core i5 760 @2.8Ghz
8GB DDR3 RAM (4x 2gb)
Asus P7H55-M motherboard
eVGA GTX 460 1024mb GDDR5
OCZ technology PSU model no. OCZGXS1010 (1010w)

TSSTcorp CDDVDW
64gb OCZ-Petrol SSD - Windows OS drive
160gb Maxtor sata HDD
160gb Hitachi sata HDD
1tb Samsung sata HDD

Running Windows Home Premium 64-bit SP1.

Very eager to install my new card and play my game with improved graphics I set to it and within a few minutes had my old card out, and my new card in.

The first problem that I encountered was that after booting up, my mouse cursor would not move, although my usb mouse was receiving power (the lights were on). I couldn't figure out what the problem might be, so I replaced my new graphics card with my previous one and tried booting up again, experiencing the same issue. With no clue as to how I should proceed, I decided to unplug and plug back in all the cables on my motherboard.

I turned my pc on again and it booted into windows safe mode, and my cursor responded when I moved my mouse. I booted back into normal Windows and again my cursor responded. I replaced my old graphics card with the new and again my cursor responded. Pleased with this progress I tried to open the nVidia Control Panel and then my pc's power cut out.

I then replaced the new card with my old again, and booted back up, but the power kept cutting out before it even got to windows. This time I unplugged everything from my motherboard except one hard drive and my old graphics card but the power kept cutting out. This time I took everything out of my motherboard, including my cpu fan and cpu and removed the bios battery. I left it for 10 minutes and then replaced all these components. I was then able to boot back into windows with my OS solid state drive and original graphics card plugged in. I reconnected all of my hard drives and dvd-rom and again was able to boot into windows and it stayed stable for 10-15 minutes.

Again I attempted to replace my old card with my new and was able to boot into Windows, but after a few seconds the power cut out again. This resulted in me having to do all of the above a second time with my old card, just to get my pc working again. After that I was too tired to think about anything techy and just played my game.

I have a sneaking suspicion that even though I have a 1010w PSU that should be able to provide more than enough power to my hardware, the fact that my new graphics card is 2 generations newer than my motherboard and cpu are what is causing this issue.

At the moment I have a 4-pin power connector for my CPU but my board and psu have the capacity to go up to 8-pin but I was hesitant to try that as I would prefer to continue using my old card for the time being rather than fry my cpu and have no computer at all.

I am sorry for the long-winded post, but I felt that I needed to fully explain what I went through up to this point and I would like to ask for any advice that anyone with more tech savvy than myself can provide. Is there a way to make my new card work with my current system, or am I looking to upgrade my board and cpu?

Thank you for reading this, and for any advice you can provide.

Matthew