Big BIG problem

[aznxk3vi17]

So, right now I'm on the verge of crying/cursing. My few months old system, running on a 3400+ (754 pin) on the DFI Lanparty is now randomly crashing on me.

The last thing I did was open the case, clean it from dust, then closed it. Now, whenever I run ANYTHING that runs from the video card, using anything remotely related to acceleration, within a few minutes, I get the hardest of hard physical crashes. Screen goes black, sound cuts off abruptly with some static and sharp noise, then back to the loading screen for the BIOS. It goes back to posting, as if I had just turned on the computer.

Now, I'm scared. I've cleaned my computer many times. How come now I'm getting crashes? What did I do??

 

[CrispyFried]

loose cards/cards/connectors. All fans still running OK?

 

[aznxk3vi17]

I checked the fans, all running at normal speeds. I think I might try reseating the video card, but seriously, how does a can of compressed air and a vacuum to suck up the floating dust do anything to change my computer? I tried underclocking my video card by over 50 mhz in the core, but I still crashed in about the same time!

 

[GuitarDaddy]

check to make sure you don't have a wire stopping the VGA fan, this happened to me once

 

[aznxk3vi17]

Just checked, video card's fan is running properly. I've also been checking my temps... on my Geforce 6800GT, I'm idling around 55, which is perfectly normal for that card. It's not even temperature that's causing the crash, as I am running some very simple 2d applications for about 2 minutes before my system just hard crashes. Similar times for 3d games. What could be causing a crash of this nature, if not heat??

 

[aznxk3vi17]

I am running the case with the side off right now. Cleaned some more dust (there was some big dust bunnies that settled on the chipset's heatsink). Right now, I ran a few runs of the 2d program that was crashing 2 minutes into it, and it hasn't crashed for about 5 or so minutes. I'm hoping that the dust on the chipset was causing some unnecessary heat to the chipset (I do know that the nforce3 250gb's chipset runs very hot). Going to replace the side and check if it is heat or that. Wish me luck!

 

[aGreenAgent]

That really sounds like the video card is overheating. I'd really check to see if the card is having any problems.

If the video dies but the sound still makes any noise, it's generally the video card crashing.

 

[aznxk3vi17]

The problem would still occur when I was underclocking as I mentioned before. My video card has reached hotter temperatures before, so I ruled that out far before anything else. For now it's actually stable, so I'm assuming the dust on the heatsink was causing overheating to the chipset.