Problems with new GTX 970 card

[Bryan Harmon]

Greetings. I have an Alienware X51 R2. I had been doing a lot of research online regarding upgrading the gpu. I found very helpful YouTube videos and threads here on this website about it. I felt confident so I upgraded my gpu to a gtx 970 and my psu to a 330W. It seemed to work fine for the first few weeks but know when I am playing Wildstar my screen randomly goes black as if the gpu is just shutting down. Game is still on, sound still playing, i can move and attack.. but my screen is gone. (I say Wildstar because I have yet to play enough of another game to see if it does it on all games) When I restart my computer it works again. I have EVGA Precision running and it is set to 99% power. All setting seem to be running fine and I'm not red lining anything.

Does anyone know what could be going on? I'm no computer expert but I'm learning and have come a long way in the past few years so yes I know it is better to build my own PC now rather than buy prebuilt but that is water under the bridge at this point. So if anyone has experience with this and can help me I would greatly appreciate it. Thx!

 

[Sergeant_Sneaky]

The minimum recommended PSU is 500w, according to Nvidia. 330w just isn't enough to power your whole system.

 

[Bryan Harmon]

The minimum recommended PSU is 500w, according to Nvidia. 330w just isn't enough to power your whole system.

This is what I thought initially but after researching further online I found many people saying that the 330W psu was fine for the gtx 970 including this thread from Tom's
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2572603/alienware-x51-upgrade-geforce-gtx-760-oem-evga-geforce-gtx-970.html

Could this still be the issue? if so do they make a 500W psu for the X51 or do these psu's need to be Dell specific models to work with the machine?

Also, I recently rolled back my graphic driver and forgot to roll it back forward to the latest GTA5 Nvidia driver. After doing so I played for close to an hour with no issue. Hopefully that works but I get the feeling the problem will continue.

 

[Sergeant_Sneaky]

The minimum recommended PSU is 500w, according to Nvidia. 330w just isn't enough to power your whole system.

This is what I thought initially but after researching further online I found many people saying that the 330W psu was fine for the gtx 970 including this thread from Tom's
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2572603/alienware-x51-upgrade-geforce-gtx-760-oem-evga-geforce-gtx-970.html

Could this still be the issue? if so do they make a 500W psu for the X51 or do these psu's need to be Dell specific models to work with the machine?

Also, I recently rolled back my graphic driver and forgot to roll it back forward to the latest GTA5 Nvidia driver. After doing so I played for close to an hour with no issue. Hopefully that works but I get the feeling the problem will continue.

I don't know what "PSU's" come with the x51 as it is a power brick, but if its not around 90%+ efficient, which I highly doubt they are, then the power isn't going to be enough. My friend had an x51 and got a new case with a normal PSU and motherboard when he upgraded. The new driver for GTA 5 was a terrible one for me, I rolled back to 347.88.