Faulty GPU and/or PSU?

I already asked this on another forum but they weren't very helpful, so I'm just gonna paste my post here:

Well, I recently moved to another country and brought my PC with me. When I arrived and unpacked, the GPU was unmounted and kinda just.. thrown inside there. So I just plugged it back in, and left it there, already thinking of which GPU I would upgrade to because it would most likely have suffered damage.

Well, 5 days later I set up my PC and when I turn it on everything goes fine until I log into windows. Then, there'll be these weird artifacts for a second, then the monitor goes back to normal, but the screen is frozen. Then it unfreezes, and repeats itself until I get no image whatsoever. Just now, tried the PC again and it Blue screened on me after one of the freezes. I'm guessing the GPU is faulty right?

So, yeah. Just to confirm if it's a GPU problem, and to know of good possible upgrades from a 4850. I can't really give you a budget since I don't live in the states so prices will vary. It would be around $150 dollars, I think.


Anyway, the thing is.. after I opened up my case to check if the GPU had any physical damage on it, I plugged it back in after finding nothing, but now the PC won't start. At all. It won't even give that usual "juice" that dead PSUs usually give (like, CPU fan starts for a second then shuts off).

When I plug the power cord to the PSU, the CPU fan will spin for a second then stop for 5 seconds, then spin again for a second, then stop and so on. That's WITHOUT me touching the power button. It does that while the PC is turned off.

My father says I blew the PSU, because here in Chile the voltage is 110v and in Brazil it was 220v. And the fact that I plugged it with a protector straight to the wall outlet instead of using a stabilizer (because you simply can't find a stabilizer here in Chile, they don't use them). I asked on another forum before if I could use the PC without a stabilizer and they said it was A-OK, and they also said it didn't matter the voltage, because modern PSUs support both. I don't know though.. I heard my PSU (A Corsair 550VX) had protection against this sort of thing.. can't believe it crapped out that easily.


What I really want to know is:

Could the freezes from before have been caused by the PSU because I was not using a stabilizer? Could it really be dead? Is a stabilizer definitely needed to use a PC that comes from another country?