[clearzero]

Hello, I don't know where else to turn.

PC Specs -

MSI 970A-G46 motherboard
800W Power supply (can't recall the brand, and not near the PC at the moment. If this is important, let me know)
AMD FX8150 CPU overclocked to 3.9GHz with watercooled heat sink
8GB (4GBx2) Kingston HyperX 1600MHz
MSI AMD Radeon HD7870 2GB, 256bit GPU (and yes I have connected the two 6 pin power cables to it)
1TB HDD (unsure of brand, if needed let me know)
3TB secondary HDD (unsure of brand, if needed let me know)

Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium Edition

I have a custom built gaming PC that was running great until I installed a new GPU. I first started with the Gigabyte Nvidia GT520 when the PC was built and it ran great and the system was bullet proof. That GPU lacked some serious power so I upgraded to the EVGA GTX660 Nvidia card that's when I started getting horrible instability, so I sent it back thinking the card was bad and got the MSI AMD HD7870 2GB 256bit but I am having similar issues with this one as well. I get seemingly random BSOD showing 'bad pool header'. If I install the original card (GT520) the issues go away. Did I really get 2 bad GPUs in a row or is there something else going on here?

I had taken it in to a PC repair place and they ran scans on the HDD and the RAM and found no issues. Their 'solution' was to reintsall Windows 7, which I had already done multiple times before taking it in.


Things I've tried:

-Different drivers, from the oldest available to the newest beta versions, nothing helps here.
-Reinstalled windows 7 multiple times as stated to no avail.
-Tried reverting my OC settings back to factory standards. (when I first got my PC the CPU was OC'd to 4.6GHz, I have since turned it to about 4GHz, this helped resolve some other BSOD, now all I get is bad pool headers)

I'm fairly confident that the issue is deriving from either the driver for the GPU (I've tried multiple drivers, from oldest to newest for the 7870), there is some hardware problem, or my overclock settings are just not jiving with the new GPU. I don't know a lot about overclocking and can't find many how to's on it either. It's quite possible there is some issue here as well.

One more thing, if this helps. I can generate a BSOD bad pool header everytime by attempting to play a youtube video. Other times it seems to happen during other menial tasks. Surprisingly I can game typically with no issues at all. The GPU works great for games but has caused other areas to become highly unstable.


If I left anything out, please feel free to ask. Any help you could provide would be great.