Help with diagnosing problem with PC

Recently my PC has starting "crashing" to the black "No Input detected" screen on my monitor. The PC stays powered on until I hard reset. This happens every time I start up a game or initiate any HD quality video playback.

A little internet research suggested a GPU issue. I tried a few random fixes, and the one that worked was to throttle my GPU clock from about 800 MHz down to 500 MHz with an older version of EVGA's precision X software. This stops the computer from crashing about 98% of the time now, but bumping that number back over 525 or so will crash it every time.

Obviously, I don't want to keep doing this forever going forward, and I was thinking about buying a new card on cyber monday coming up. Any ideas if putting in a new card should be enough to fix whatever is going on. I still don't really know exactly what the problem is.

Specs

1TB SATA III 7200 RPM 3.5" HARD DRIVE 1

16GB CORSAIR VENGEANCE 1600MHZ DDR3

BLACK AXP970-001 BK MID TOWER NO WINDOW and ASETEK 510LC 120MM WATERCOOLER

GIGABYTE Z68MA-D2H-B3 INTEL Z68 CROSSFIRE DDR3 SATA3

RAIDMAX RX-850AE 850 WATT 80 PLUS GOLD POWER SUPPLY

SUPERCLOCK EVGA NVIDIA GTX 570 1.2 GB GDDR5 PCI-E

WINDOWS 7 HOME PREMIUM 64-BIT

OEM INTEL I5-2500K 3.30 GHZ 6M LGA

easiest way forward would be to use the onboard gpu for testing purposes. remove your 570 from your computer temporarily, route your monitor through the motherboard and run off the intel apu.

If you get the same problem it's not the gpu. If everything's good, it is.

Sorry, I posted a solution, but I realized I misundetstood ur problem. Good luck anyway duder

@jadeskye: That's a good idea. Thanks.

It sounds like a heating problem in your GPU, as lower performances don't cause it to crash. If you switch the 3D graphics card, the PC should work fine from then on.

You should install a program that monitors the temperature of your processor and graphics card, so you can check on it and know when it's too hot, like: http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

Yeah, took the GPU out and games seem to play fine (much slower obviously). Seems like that's the only hardware that's messed up. Nice to know.

@jeust: Would a crash from an overheat happen like immediately after loading up a game like it does for me? Not saying your wrong, just don't know.

yeah i was going to post its the GPU / PSU, the fact that you had to throttle the GPU DOWN and then games worked 98% fine your issues are clearly with the GPU either its on its way out, or your power supple is busted and cant produce enough power to your system with the GPU in.

It doesn't have to be a case of overheating specifically, it can be a voltage issue or memory problem. All signs point to the card being broken - although I would make sure to try older drivers first because my 560 would lock up with more recent drivers than ones from around April, because of an ongoing bug with the older-series cards and web browser hardware acceleration rendering. Mine would lock up and freeze, so not exactly the same, but it is worth checking.

Raidmax used to sell terrible PSUs, I think the one you have is just after they switched OEMs to someone a little better, so hopefully that isn't the problem. Obviously it would be nice if you had a different GPU to test it with, but I wouldn't have thought simply playing HD video would put enough of a strain on it to cause the problem, especially if it works fine underclocked.

Don't forget that EVGA cards quite often have a 3 year warranty, and if you're still in the warranty period and they don't have any 570s in stock they'll bump you up to something better.