Weird Vista crash

[MercuryAE]

Not sure if I should post this in the OS section or hardware... I just finished constructing a new system with a q9550, p5q-e, 4 gig OCZ reaper 1066 RAM, GTX 260. Unfortunately, after agonizing over part selection and meticulous assembly, I'm worried I may have a giant paperweight.

During the installation of windows vista home premium, the installation process froze several times, once with a mess of distorted patterns on the screen. I removed some older hardware components assuming they might be interfering with the process (old IDE hard drive and DVD drive, as well as an Audigy sound card). I started the installation over and Vista booted up. Moments later, a bunch of gobblety-gook shows up on the screen (weird random pattern of colors and lines) and it freezes there. I restarted, installed the nvidia drivers (hadn't yet gotten to it) and didn't have any issues for 30 minutes or so until out of the blue it did it again (same distorted screen deal, although slightly different image).

Does anybody have any idea what could be causing this? The motherboard and cpu temps are good (35 C and 19 C respectively). The case is well ventilated, and while I'm not sure what my video card temps are, it feels only warm to the touch.

Thanks in advance for the input.

 

[Mav451]

The gobblety-gook sounds like a GPU issue that isn't heat-related. I could just be a bad card, so try booting with a standard PCI card to test it.

*particularly since you aren't even at load (3d gaming).

 

[MercuryAE]

Thanks, I'll try to get my hands on another graphics card. The problem has since cropped up again a couple times, but it seems to be random with no specific event triggering it.