Crash with 460 2win

First of all, I'd like to say that this card is a beast, considering it's now 2/3 generations old. It can run every single player at full quality, and multiplayer around medium. The only problem I've had is with MSAA, but that's just the slightly limited VRAM coming into play. Even ran the Crysis 3 Beta at low/medium (still beautiful) quite smoothly.

Now to my problem. I've been getting lots of crashes with my rig posted below, sometimes it'll survive the night perfectly, sometimes crashes every five minutes, and sometimes I can't even get past the login screen. If there's sound coming through, I get a sort of buzzing, digital noise. I know it's not temperature, I never pass 60, and power shouldn't be an issue because it ran just fine on my old Corsair 650TX. Even so, I turned off all power limiters in BIOS and still had problems.

I've troubleshot every component, and the only fix was plopping in a 10 year old ATI card that Win7 driver doesn't even support. So I've narrowed it down to being only the video card, and I've been confirmed an RMA from EVGA, but I'd rather not lose my pc for 2 weeks. So if there's another fix, I'd be eternally grateful.

Anyone? My RMA has a time limit.

I'll talk to myself a little bit here. I set my CPU back to default from my 4GHz OC and that had no effect on the crashes, but when I underclocked it on stock voltage to 2.86GHz, it seems to make the crashes less frequent. What would this hint towards?

Step1 in chasing down any crashes is setting everything to 100% stock. Once you've done that you can move on to further stuff.

Step2 is running prime95 for an hour or two on your CPU.

Step3 is running Some Known 3D Load (I like Unigine's benches) on loop for an hour or two.

Step4 is to do both at the same time.

Step 1: Tried that, didn't fix it.

Step 2: Running now, ran great at 4GHz so I don't expect any issues at stock.

Step 3: Are there free ones? I'd prefer that.

Step 4: Hopefully I will run it overnight tomorrow.

My only problem with any of this is the crashing. I'm hoping it doesn't crash before the tests have enough time to run.

Prime95 ran great and after 7-8hrs it was still pushing through (at 49C). I'll see if I can get Heaven or 3dMark tonight and run that for a while.

I've had a revelation! (Not that it matters, because no one is paying attention) I now remember this started happening when I installed the first Mass Effect a little while back. Could that installation be causing a full system failure? Is that even possible?

A little more information on the crashes that I should have provided in the first place: the order of events.
1) Screens go black, no signal, etc.
2) Sound remains for a short time, as does communication through Skype
3) I hear a buzzing noise from whatever sound device I'm using
4) System reboot
5) Freeze after reboot

Talking to myself, but I passed all four steps with flying colors. I'm at a loss

A game would be the unlikely culprit. It sound like your CPU is toast. I have 2 eVGA GTX 460 1GB SLI and I've never had a problem with them at any time and they are heavily overclocked. When I had my old Core2Duo E8400 it started to die and give me the same problems your reporting.

Once I upgraded to an i5 2500K everything was fine again and the CPU is heavily overclocked to 4.5GHz. I'm still rocking with my GTX 460 1GB SLI setup.

Yeah these things are suprisingly powerful (and power hungry). However, there's just one snag in your idea: This is the second CPU I've had in here that did this. I broke the old one installing my H60, and the problem happened with that one too.

I've tried everything and it's definitely the GPU. I even tried overvolting/underclocking the card just to make sure that wasn't the problem, and it still died. Dropped in a friends old 5670 and it ran just great.

I'll be doing the RMA process. Would anyone be willing to buy this thing off me after it's returned? I want to upgrade to 6xx

I'm very happy that you solved your problem. I really thought it was the CPU but you've shown it was the GPU. You should be able to get $50 for the new GTX 460.

Lol it's actually two of them on a single card.

Oops,my bad. You shouldn't have any problem selling it for $150. I know I'd buy it if I didn't already have 2 GTX 460 1GB SLI. I paid $600 for both back in 2010 so yours is definately worth $150.