Computer crashing when watching videos or playing games

[Kaiyoko]

I recently installed a new heatsink in my 1 1/2 year old machine because my CPU was overheating quite a bit. Computer would shut down w/o any notification and when I would restart it, I would get messages from the BIOS that the cpu was over heating.

Now after installing my new heatsink I've ran into a new issue that I had not encountered before. Basically, every time I either watch a video, watch a stream, or play a game the computer will completely lock up after about 30 seconds. It seems to be able to run fine long as non of the above is happening, I ran the computer over night to see if it would freeze from that as well with a bunch of programs running ( Word, Steam, etc ) no issues. However, right when I went to watch a video it locks up and I'm forced to hold the power button to restart.

I'm not sure if I damaged anything in the process of installing the new heatsink or not, but I'm trying to pinpoint the issue and would like any advice at this point.

Some things I've tried:

- Switching out video cards, I have a GTX 560 that I normally used in the computer,but I switch it out with my old GTS 250. Same issue occurs so I don't think it's a GPU issue. I've tried the GTX 560 on my older computer and it works fine as well.

- I took the new heatsink off and then reattached it, in case that caused an issue, still occurring

- Removed 1 of my 4 GB RAM sticks and tried with each one once

- Reinstalled flash, a lot of videos use it as well as games, just to make sure

- GPU temps are around 40 C and CPU around 35 C when the freeze happens

- I'm not over-clocking anything right now

System Specs:
CPU: AMD FX-8120 8-core
Motherboard: Sabertooth 990FX
Memory: Corsair 4GB x 2 1666 DDR3
GPU: GTX 560 2GB 256-bytes
PSU: Corsair CX600 750 watts

Thanks.

[xopher]

Reinstall your GPU drivers.

[Kaiyoko]

Lol wow can't believe I over looked that. Thanks.

Been running videos for about 5 min now, with no issues. Which it was within seconds crashing before. Will update if it continues though.

Seems very strange that removing it once to install a heatsink would cause this.

[xopher]

Probably not related.

[Kaiyoko]

Sorry for the necro, but this issue popped up for me again.

All I have done to change from when it was working is install the 320.49 drivers from nvidia. I have removed them and re-installed 314.22 with a clean install, which I was previously using, but it did not fix the issue. Anyone have any ideas?

[Kaiyoko]

Nvm ignore. I did a system restore back to 2 days ago and that removed w/e issue there was.

[Mellema]

Just out of curiosity, have you installed or updated any games with Direct X lately. I've noticed a couple times now that after I've loaded new games from Steam that each game tries to install Direct X again and for some reason that has messed up my nvidia drivers.

[Kaiyoko]

Just out of curiosity, have you installed or updated any games with Direct X lately. I've noticed a couple times now that after I've loaded new games from Steam that each game tries to install Direct X again and for some reason that has messed up my nvidia drivers.

Hmm I haven't installed directx through steam or anything else in at least a year.