iphgix: My son's Geforce 480 ?? I think or 460...was crashing , throwing up artifacts and rebooting his windows. We took the fan off, scraped off the old dry thermal paste, put on a THIN layer of high quality paste, and reattached the fan. It works good as new now. I am glad to be able to show my son these types of things. We discussed how the thermal paste fills in gaps so small that you can not see them that would allow pockets of air to heat up the GPU, and generally had that interaction you are talking about.
Although in his case he wants his card to die so he can buy a newer Radeon card, because the Radeons seems to mine cryptocurrency faster and he recently started that as well.
It's time to put him down. ;_;
