Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!

[Caboos001]

Caboos001: First, is your system clean? Second, do you have adequate airflow for the fans? Even on liquid, it helps. Third, are your coolant levels OK? I might suggest removing the heat sink on the CPU, cleaning off the old thermal paste, and applying new paste. Oh, and what are your GPU temperatures? Also, 'Lancer, he's not running a Sandy Bridge Core series, he's on Nehalem. Different tolerances.

My GPU runs at 40c on average, I have yet to take a reading while gaming. My machine is very clean at the moment, nothing serious that could cause heat problems. My air flow seems alright. the systems seems to be ventilating ok; I am however considering picking up a PCI slot case cooler such as this,Link, to improve it some. Lastly, I honestly have no idea what my coolant levels are at, I'll have to check.

Edit: Ok so I took a look and my coolant levels are fine. I did manage to take off my heat sink, however, this is my first time doing so, and I have no idea weather or not I need to apply new thermal paste. I imagine doing it regardless can't hurt. I did snap a couple of pictures and from the looks of it I may need to do just that.



I'll be running some stress tests over night to see if the issue may be something besides heat problem. Though the fact that cooling the machine with an epic box fan seems to keep it from crashing keeps me leaning towards a heat problem.