Radeon 9800 Pro Randomly Reboots

Ok so I just picked up a Powercolor Radeon 9800 Pro, the 128-bit. I installed it two days ago but my computer kept restarting randomly and definately when I went into 3d applications. So after looking online and asking around a little I found out the most likely problem is the power supply (I had a crappy 300 watt that came with my case, 15A at 12V). So I just picked up a Ultra 500watt psu and installed it, works fine with my old card except for a little distortion on the screen trailing the mouse and in spots where stuff should be shaded, but I credited that to all the drivers I had been trying and uninstalling the last two days trying to get this thing to work.

So I reinstalled the 9800 Pro and its still doing randomly rebooting. I tried detonator destroyer which doesnt find anything, omega drivers dont fix it, DNA drivers dont fix it, I'm not sure if driver cleaner did anything. The disk that came with the card doesnt work and when I download the official ATI drivers from the official site it says the files are corrupt. I've noticed the card is running pretty hot. Someone said it could be my RAM but I don't know how or why that would be the case... Could it be something with my bios? directx? a setting I have on that i shouldnt?

My computer specs are:

Asus A7V8X-X motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2600+ barton 1.83ghz
512 kingston DDR ram 2700
this new radeon 9800 pro
SB Legacy X gamer sound card

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

tried newer chipset drivers yet?

First off, I'd allow your system to get BSOD's. Hit windows key+pause, click the advanced tab, settings under Startup and Recovery, and unclick automatically restart. If you do get a BSOD, get the message it gives you!

Do other vid cards do this? Also, the heat could possibly be a problem. Artifacts happen sometimes because the card is running too hot. You may want to at least put some better thermal paste on the stock heatsink, or even better get an aftermarket cooler for it.

BTW, welcome to the forums!

ill try getting new chipset drivers, and i just took off automatically restart i'll see whats up... My old video card was a radeo 9600 SE (crap i know) but it worked fine until I started playing around with this new one. But even when I reinstalled the 9600 SE after I realized the 9800 wouldnt work, I was getting the slight distortion, they arent artifacts, just very faint verticl lines going through certain parts of the screen.

Ok, I took off Automatically Restart and I opened Unreal Tournament 2004, it got past the point it normally restarts at, even got to the menu, which looked fine, but after about 2 seconds the monitor flashed black and then took me to a blank blue screen and I had to do a hard reboot.

Just randomly restarted and I got this at the blue screen:

"A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage toyour computer.

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL"

then it says something about disabling bios memory options such as caching or shadowing and starting in safe mode and removing the new hardware

it also gave a long error message that said

STOP: 0x000000A.................................etc

ok, now i'm getting the STOP: 0x00000024 message, something about NTFS.sys, tells me to run chkdsk /f ..... how do i know now if this is the video card's fault or if its something else. should i send it back or do i need to change another component, maybe my motherboard? reformat my hard drive? im really at a loss here.