Help needed with Windows desktop

[Garrett]

All is still well, but I wish I could figure out what caused the black screens & artifacts.. all is well according to the multiple different system utilities I've used & I've just nervously ran a short 1hr complete system stability test in Aida64 Extreme and apart from a sec or so black screen & things getting very warm indeed there weren't any problems with that either. I'm still too nervous to try a game though (even a match 3) as the last couple of times I did the problems started.. could a software issue have caused the problem & if so what sort of thing? that would make sense now I've reinstalled the OS as whatever the software may have been is now long gone.

 

[Klumpen]

This seems like a silly question to some, but:
How often do you clean your fans?

 

[SNESFAN]

I had this exact same problem with a dell xps laptop. Dell had a couple people look at the problem, had me flash bios's etc, opened it up and gave it a good heatsink and fan cleaning, format and recover, but it didn't do anything. Dell eventually replaced to video card as it was under warranty.

I 2nd or 3rd the suggestion to replace the thermal paste on the GPU. A younger version of myself didn't know enough about computers at the time to think to try that. The problem only happened when I would game for a while until it eventually was happening constantly. Definitely pointed to warn down thermal paste as the fan still worked fine and was clean with good air flow.