Need Diagnosis Confirmation on PC Hardware Issue

[Nikose Tyris]

A friend of mine in the US has had an issue that cropped up a long while back.

His computer would blackscreen while running a graphics intensive game. The video card would just crap out and die.

The program became progessively more frequent until just playing the CD konked out the graphics.

I asked him to unplug his Disk drives on his computer. Black screen issue was temporarily solved.

The issue then reappeared roughly 14 hours later, as he was playing Portal 2.

he pre-emptively unplugged his now-needless physics card and his extra soundcard, switching to onboard.

Again, issue went away for a while.

He reseated his video card correctly, rebooted and continued.

Today his computer has nothing but the video card and a single hard drive extra hooked up, and he's beginning to see the black screen on doing anything more than running Y!M. Even drawing USB power for his webcam sees the black screen occur.


I've diagnosed this as a Power Supply issue, and mailed my buddy a new 500w; but I'm not 100% this was the issue. The other thought was that it could be the video card itself, and that the delays from unhooking other hardware were coincidental.

Thoughts/input is appreciated from the respected Techies on NPF.

Additional information:
[His machine was running a fully updated Vista, on a Dell XPS machine from late 2008. His power supply is supposedly a 1000w but I'm suspicious of it. His Tower has also been through two moves, one of them across the US to California. Concerned with issues of weather/travelling to shorten the lifespan.]