Sapphire 4870 1 gb system continuous restart problem

spuhngee

Distinguished
Jun 3, 2009
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18,510
Hello everyone,

Recently i've run into a problem with my newly purchased sapphire 4870 card. I've had it for about 3 weeks and its been great so far, handling all my games like Crysis, Oblivion, Call of Juarez, with no problems. Yesterday however, in the middle of browsing the internet, I heard a fan in my case (found out later it was my graphics card's fan), accelerate and start spinning like crazy, making a ton of noise. It did that for about 10 seconds before my computer restarted.
It restarts, gets into my windows vista desktop for about 5 seconds before restarting again, and it repeats that process until i force it to shut off.
I tried uninstalling the drivers, but that only makes it do the same thing, but even before windows loads.
I put in my old xfx 8800 gts 640 today and that works fine.
So im guessing it must be that there is something wrong with my graphics card, or my psu isn't good enough for my 4870. But i've never run into any problems for 3 weeks until yesterday.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

My specs:
amd athlon x2 6000
sapphire hd 4870 1 gb
4 gb ddr2 800 ram
160 gb hard drive
NZXT pp500 psu 500 watt (12v1=16a, 12v2=17a)
gigabyte ga-m55sli-s4 mobo
Windows vista ultimate service pack 1 32 bit

Nothing overclocked