Video Card trouble?

I no longer have this video card any more, but I was wondering if anyone may have an idea as to what was happening. A couple of months ago I bought a new video card. My old one (the one I'm having to use again) is a Radeon x300 series. Its very old and I cant play high-performance games on it. So I decided to buy a new video card. I ended up buying a Radeon HD 3850 cideo card. It is a very good video card. With it, I could play Bioshock with the highest specs and there would be no choppy frame-rates. I tried playing the Crysis demo with it and I could play it on Medium/High specs with no choppy frame-rates. But if I played a game which required a high performance card, the computer would suddenly crash and reset. I had to get a new power supply with the video card so the promblem shouldn't be that. My old power supply was a 300W power supply and the new one is a 550W.|||It could have been driver related. I had a couple of different ATI video cards(all the same brand and specs) and had similar issues. I had to get the ATI card I had RMA'ed(sent back) cause I started having problems with it. that first one was sent back cause it was showing weird blocks on the screen, they sent me a new one and I had it for a while(about 2 weeks) and I started having some issues with almost the same problems as before. Called ATI back up and got another card sent to me. The thrid card I would end up gtting the same exact thing but also at times I would get random crashes. It would not happen all the time when I was playing. I called ATI up once again and this time they told me to uninstall and download the latest drivers. If I still had issues just reinstall over the latest drivers I just installed. Well that seemed to help with some problems for about 3-4 weeks and then I would have to reinstall the drivers again. I did the for 2 years. The ATI Customer Representative said that ATI cards do have drivers issues(weird that this person admits ATI had these issues) and in order for me to play games I would have to continue doing this until they resolved the problems. Which they never did. each driver release I still had the same problems and eventually I downloaded some newer drivers and tried playing one game and the game would not start up at all. The driver did not support that game at all(Oblivion was the game if you are wondering).



I just built myself a new computer about 3 months ago and this time i decided to get away from ATI. Yes they have good cards but the cards are worthless if the drivers are no good.

I now have an Nvidia 8800GT and so far(knocking on wood) I have had no issues what so ever. I had an Nvidia card before the ATI cards and I had no problems out of it either, it just got old and would not play a lot of newer games. I got the ATI card on a friends recommendation which I will not listen to him again.

I also had thought it was the PSU I had in the old computer. I had a 300W PSU and I then bought a 550W PSU too and I still had the problems. Maybe just try doing as the ATI Customer Representative told me to do, just reinstall the drivers over the existing drivers and see if that solves the problems.