Hello techspot, you all havent heard from me since i set out on building this machine about a year ago. Well everythings been gravy since this past saturday night. My system specs should be up at the top right of this post btw.

I was using this year-old machine as usual that night, not even gaming, when for the first time it shut off on its own. On an attempt to reboot, the machine didnt reach the loading screen for vista before it shut itself off again. Not a restart, a straight up shut off. After trying to boot it up a couple more times to no avail, I went to the first logical diagnosis-it was overheating.

Now since this is a liquid cooling system for the cpu, solving this overheating seemed relatively easy. There is a radiator on the front of the case with two 12" fans blowing into it, forming the intake of the airflow throughout the case. These two fans are covered from the outside by drive bay covers, each with a foam-type material to allow airflow. I pulled these drive bay covers to find a thick layer of dust on the inside of each. I cleaned all of the dust off of each and started the machine without replacing the drive bay covers to ensure the radiator fans were unrestricted. I immediately noticed that the liquid cooling pump started gurgling and this gave me hope. The machine booted up fine and once i got it to the desktop, i messed around online for a bit and called it a night, seeing as it was about 3 am at that point.

The following day i didnt use the machine and went out of town for a couple days. During that time, my brother used it to find that it turned off on him after using it for a while. After being shut down involuntarily a couple of times, the monitor stopped displaying an image.

The machine posts and everything and appears to be running fine other than there being no image displayed on my 20" HP LCD. There is no image even before the loading screen of vista, the light on the LCD is always amber. The hard drive access light is blinking continually until i turn the machine off.

I have reviewed similar threads with an issue of no image being sent to the monitor and have found a recurring solution to these problems with the 4-pin aux power cable not being attached to the motherboard. This cable has always been attached, along with another drive cable that attaches right above the PCIe x16 slot where my graphics card resides. The only thing i have tried is relocating the ram into the other slots and reseating the graphics card (besides the before mentioned dust removal).

So what is up here guys? Am i dealing with a shot graphics card, a virus, a dead mobo, is my psu not putting out enough, or what? my biggest fear is a virus because i dont have the slightest clue how i would go about fixing it with no image on the monitor.

Thanks in advance

for some reason, my system specs arent revealing the power supply or case that i have.

PSU: Thermaltake Silent Purepower 550w MAX (480w)
case:Thermaltake Armor Lcs VE2000