Nope, 50C is fine, in fact on the cooler side for either GPU's or CPU's.
Now, it's possible that there was some thermal damage already done to the GPU on your graphics card that would cause this as wll.
However, you would have to have another graphics card to test this out and see.
As for the PS Unit, OCZ makes some fine products so I would think this wouldn't be the cause of the lockups, and the fact that you mention both games and 3D apps that tax the GPU heavily, this may indeed indicate that the issue is the graphics card.