By Reinstalled my PC last night.
I've been having a few niggles playing 3D games. They've been starting up ok but the second I start to play the system freezes and hits the hard drive. It started off as an infrequent problem but has got gradually worse until it reached the point where it would happen every 10-15 seconds in a game.
After taking advice from a decent tech forum I'd uninstalled and reinstalled a number of different drivers and tried a number of different BIOS settings all to no avail. Finally bit the bullet and decided to do a full reinstall. Typically, it didn't solve the problem and I decided to swap out my gfx card for a much older one that I've got lying about; in order to see if that'd solve the problem. The thought was that I could also try my gfx card in another system.
Anyway, took my card out of the PC and discovered it was caked in dust and the fan couldn't spin up. The fan only spins up when the card needs it. Unclogged the card, put in back in, and all is good.
Considering I don't smoke and nobody is allowed into my room whilst smoking it's quite amazing how much dust had built up.
Think I'll be taking the card out every 6 months or so to make sure it doesn't get that bad in the future.
That was a bit of time wasted. However, by you posting it on the net in your blog, it will probably let people (like me) think of blasting out the fuzz before reinstalling.
Glad to hear everything is working okay now, shame you did a full reinstall before finding the problem.
I believe FX5950's have a temperature sensor in the GPU core and the reading is probably displayed in one of the driver's control panel screens. It might be a good idea to check that from time to time to ensure it is running at around the usual temperature, which for GPUs is often much higher than CPUs-- mine used to reach as much as 110C before fitting a slot exhaust blower thingy I bought at Maplins, which lowered it by over 20C. It varies from card to card, but even 110C wasn't dangerously high for it as the 'Core slowdown threshold' was preset to a staggering 135C!
Dust is always a problem with modern PCs, I'm hoping that the dust-filter in front of the intake fans will minimise the amount that gets into my case; it's a quicker job to clean the filter than the whole PC.
Still, getting into a PC to clean it out is easier than getting into an XB360 -- you just know dust is going to build up inside them and that the reports of them overheating and crashing there have been so far are nothing compared with what it'll be like when a year's worth of dust has accumulated :)
The core threshold is set to 127C and it's one of the things I did check. However, it was only ever reporting between 45C and 50C. Maybe the dust was blocking the sensor from making an accurate reading, I'm not sure. But, anyway, all is good and a lesson has been learnt.