Overheating, somewhere...

Hi, everyone. I've had an ongoing problem for a year now where after an hour or so of gaming I will get a crash involving interesting colors and jagged lines on my monitor and have to do a hard reset to get it to come back on.

I monitored temps and concluded it was a heat problem with my 7800GT, it would reach up to around 65 celsius and then I would get the crashing. I am running two 120mm intake fans in the front (one lower to cool my hard drives, and one upper to blow across the RAM at my CPU. I also have a rear 120 mm exhaust and a side 120mm that I usually position right at the underside of my GPU. This didn't solve my problem, even running a box fan up against the side of my PC didn't solve the crashing. I finally just upgraded to a 9800GT hoping this would fix the problem and no such luck. The crashes are less severe and I can game slightly longer before they occur, but I still get them.

GPU fan speed set to 100% with RivaTuner, and temp monitoring shows that all my temps idle between 35 and 45 Celsius. During gaming, the GPU gets the hottest, seems like problems still occur around the 65 celsius mark. My question is: Would a CPU overheat cause a similar symptom as a GPU? I'm wondering if maybe I've been on the wrong track this whole time and my CPU is failing at around 60 celsius. Should my next paycheck go towards a new CPU heatsink/fan and new thermal paste?

Sorry if I didn't provide enough info,let me know if there are any questions I need to answer. Thanks again, you guys always save my butt.

 

What Power Supply Unit are you running? A bad/weak PSU can cause all kinds of interesting BSODS. Also, what CPU do you have,
and what kind of cooling are you using on it? And what are you using to get the CPU and GPU temps?

E

 

Here's a more detailed list of my specs:

Antec TruPowerII 550w PSU (I've tried it with a different PSU so I don't think thats the problem)

AMD Athlon XP 64 3800+ dual core Manchester 2.0ghz
9800GT (also tested with 7800GT)
2 GB Corsair RAM
Win XP Pro
One 140GB raptor HD
One 250GB WD storage drive
DVD-R drive
Boatload of case fans

After reading up on CPU cooling I'm convinced that it's worth a try at least. I'll invest another 60 bucks in some new thermal paste and CPU cooler (Zalman says their open design will help dissipate heat on CPU and VGA, RAM etc as well so it will be worthwhile to invest in even if it doesn't solve the problem. Any other guesses? I need a whole new rebuild but I'm going to culinary school and money is tight. Thanks homies.

Temps tested with "SpeedFan" and RivaTuner, Rivatuner shows about 8 degrees warmer than Speedfan at idle.