Any computer nerds here? Hard reboots

[I_am_not_mafia]

How old is the computer? What's the power rating of the PSU?

[ignoramus]

I wouldn't stress over the cpu grease issue first.
A lot of the time, they don't use grease, just the sticky tape thermal transfer tape.
If that was the problem, you'd have an overheating issue in many areas, not just video playing.

As others have said,
The first thing I'd do is pull out the vid card and run it for a while with the onboard to prove a point first.
If it is stable after eg: 4 hours, then we know it's either a vid software/driver glitch, or the card is sucking too much juice off the power supply, not leaving enough for the mb and other peripherals. I'd have at least 600W good quality watts as a minimum 700-800 preferred (name brand ps) The knockoff powersupplies like to advertise peak outputs, and are misleading! (what's new)

[abaris]

You know, I still can't wrap my head around the fact, it happens with vids of all things.

This should be one of the least stressful operations for CPU as well as GPU. GPU doesn't seem to be the problem. It runns stable and the temperatures stay within acceptable parameters. CPU is doing better, since I cleaned the fan.

As for deactivating the onboard card. I already did that when installing the new one, which was a pain in itself, since the BIOS manual only explains one of the steps necessary and skips over the second one, which I had to find out browsing the web. The problem didn't crop up with the new card either. It's been months since I put in the card and the reboots only started two weeks ago, or so.

Min, I don't see the bluescreen. The screens just go black and the rig reboots. But you gave me an idea, since the bluescreen is something that can be activated. Maybe the error code helps in narrowing the roots of the problem down.

[SteelCurtain]

Were there any software changes that may have coincided with the problem showing up?

[abaris]

Were there any software changes that may have coincided with the problem showing up?

Other than updating the card drivers, no. Always by uninstalling the old ones and only then adding the new ones.

[ignoramus]

Also, try and use something like MPC-HC (Media Player Classic - Home Cinema) or some other.
The trick is to isolate the issue via a process of elimination otherwise we've accomplished nothing.

Try pulling one stick of ram out for a day?
That'll do 2 things, eliminate the possibility of one bad stick and also run in non interleave mode which slows down the bus.
Are you o'cing? Go into bios and make sure it's not on turbo or fast or anything ...just standard timings everywhere.

[I_am_not_mafia]

Is the cable from the PSU to the graphics card plugged in properly? I installed a new graphics card and had trouble plugging in the cable from the PSU, it just didn't want to go in all the way. After about a month it crashed in the middle of a game and then continued crashing every time I started using the graphics card, even for things like watching youtube. I found that the cable had partially slipped out so I stuck it in properly all the way in and have been fine ever since.

[abaris]

Are you o'cing? Go into bios and make sure it's not on turbo or fast or anything ...just standard timings everywhere.

No, I'm not. 4x 3,9 GHZ works well enough for my necessities. I also checked the BIOS settings already yesterday. Everything's as intended.

Edit: After running speedfan for a prolonged time, I'm pretty sure, I've got a thermal problem. Which got better after blowing out the fans. GPU, CPU and Core still get kinda hot, but 10 degrees less than before cleaning the fans. The CPU fan has picked up anopther 200 RPMs since then, which helps to keep temperatures at least pretty constant. I've also monitored CPU useage, which is between 39 and 48 percent, using all four cores.

And here's the thing. I observed that CPU useage as well as CPU and GPU temperatures are highest when an ingame cinematic is playing. To my limited understanding, this is only about callling up an inbuilt bink player and letting the video run. This, again to my limited understanding, should stress the hardware less than actually playing.

[Angrboda]

Were there any software changes that may have coincided with the problem showing up?

Other than updating the card drivers, no. Always by uninstalling the old ones and only then adding the new ones.

Is it possible to reinstall the old drivers? Bad video drivers can cause hard resets. Usually with hard resets, no error code gets recorded.

(One possibility for why ingame cinematics are spiking the cpu is that they are using software decoding for the video on the ingame video, whereas in other video players, it makes use of hardware assist.)

[bennyboy]

I don't think it's strange that CPU is spiking during in-game video. Who knows what kind of process they are running to get that video to your screen? (Oh, Jorg already said that.)

Here are your likely culprits: overheating, PSU problem, RAM fail, bad drivers, God is mad at you because of pr0n.

We've already addressed heating, it sounds like. You've already updated your drivers-- you might want to google your problem with the newest driver, because sometimes a driver rollback saves all-- I assume you've already tried removing the card and running your onboard GPU. You can try MEMTEST to see if your RAM is failing; or leave just a single stick in at a time and see if you still get the crash. And, of course, you can replace the PSU.

Does the event viewer give you any hint what's going on?