Solved - Video hardware error

Was just about to detail my problem when the answer came from the Windows 8 forum.

My PC started going to black screen a few minutes after switching on tonight. I tracked down the error in the Windows 8 reliability graph in the action centre. It said critical error - video hardware error.

Then in comes the answer from the other forum suggesting over heating. So I boot up and in between black screens I load a GPU temp utility which showed the core at 98 c. Yup looks like overheating.

To cut a long story short I found the fan was not working and it was also caked in dust. So after careful cleaning and some electrical cleaning spray on the fan it is now idling at 45 c.

TBH the card (MSI 9500GT) is a few years old now so I have ordered a new GT 610 with passive cooling (no fan) to replace it and will keep the old one as a spare.

Who would of thought a little bit of heatsink dust and a stalled fan would cause such drastic consequences.

Edited by Banger (Tue 07-Oct-14 01:14:28)

I had something similar with the CPU heatsink on a machine I was running as a home webserver. Worked perfectly until you did something like creating a large compressed archive, where it started bleeping. GKrellum told me it was the CPU temp and I was horrified at how much dust came out of the heatsink.

The new card is in, GT610 didnt realise there was a different driver to my 9500GT, but all ok and 47 c with fanless card!