Thread: EVGA GTX 260 --- PS causing all of my problems

I bought an EVGA GTX 260 over the weekend, and ever since I installed it my system has grinded to a hault. The hard drive spools down for several minutes at a time, my optical drive has difficulty reading discs, and just general lethargic behavior. The box on the card said it required a minimum of 500 watt power supply, so I thought I was ok with the Antec 550w that I bought. Do these symptoms sound like a PS problem, or could the card just be faulty? Putting my old EVGA 7950 GT KO back in my system seems to solve my problems. so it has to be one of the other. My system specs are:

Asus P5N-E SLI
2.4ghz E6600 Core 2 duo
4gb Mushkin DDR2 800
1 western digital 75gb raptor
1 Plextor SATA DVD-RW drive
Antec Neo HE550 550w PS (the 3-4 fans that came with my antec nine hundred case and of course, the GTX 260.

It's most likely you’re PSU. The Neo HE 500 has 18Amps on each 12V rail, with 12V2 and 12V3 being used by the card (12V1 is for the CPU). The card requires 36A according to the specs, so it is very likely that this is cutting it too close and putting a strain on your PSU. If you have a friend with a PSU that you can test try that.

This PC Power & Cooling 750 is on sale right now. That will give you more than enough juice for what you are running, and enough headroom to SLI 2 GTX 260s in the future if you so desire.