random BSODs after installing GFX

[dorian hawkmoon]

My friend has installed an 8800gts with thermalright heatsink. Now, he tells me that he gets BSOD (IRQL not less or equal, Memory Management dump, software hardware change) while playing games like Alien Breed Impact, Crysis and Pandora Tomorrow (which for a few days ran ok)...his and my config is almost the same, except he has a 8800gts and me a 8800gt. Our Pcs were assembled at almost the same time, his was assembled by a mechanic. His cabinet is a bit small, and he has no case fans installed, although he leaves open the side. The problem is while I was trying to format his machine errors and bluescreens came up with the addition of "cannot format" (with xp sp2 disc) and memory management/ntfs.sys errors (win 7 disc.). i was finally able to format after I had checked with Memory Diagnostic tool and in safe mode, it found a hardware error in Standard test, not Basic. It later turned out that 1 bad sector has been remapped!!!

I'm at wits end here with this problem ! Can heat be an issue, how can ram/hdd all be kaput @ the same time :shock:, while it ran just fine on an onboard gpu ?

 

[dorian hawkmoon]

Turned out that both a 1 RAM stick and HDD went kaput. That was apparently the reason