NVidia Geforce 6600 GT / Freezing up system

[Fureya]

AMD Athlon 64 processor 1.8 ghz
Asus A8V Deluxe board
2.0 gigs of Kingston ram
Geforce 6600 GT Video card

I use this machine for gaming only and it has been flawlessly running for only about 2 months now.
Today I loaded up an MMO and it froze up on me pretty much right after the game started.
Powered off, tried to reboot. Froze up while windows was loading with some scattering of pixels. Rebooted to safe mode, didn't freeze but the entire screen was extremely grainy and moving the mouse over anything distorted the image below it. Was able to maneuver myself to reboot but there were distorted images all over.

Few more times and was able to boot into a very ugly looking windows and download new Nvidia drivers. Uninstalled the old and installed the new ones. Seemed to work.

2 hours later, playing my mmo again, entire screen goes to red and blue stripes and freezes. Same thing again. Windows is starting and everything looks A-Okay but when I try to run a game, after a random interval of time, it freezes.

Any suggestions or ideas as to what the problem might be?

 

[jarvis]

I believe that is a heat problem with your 6600GT. My old 5700 ultra did something similar to that back in the day. Take the card out, clean out the fan/heatsink and everything else inside the case that has collected dust. Open your case and put a fan next to it. You might want to invest in some 80mm case fans.

 

[Fureya]

I do have about 7 case fans actually but I'll check it out and give it a good cleaning.

*update*
Well I opened it up and dusted it a little. It really wasn't very dusty though since it really hasn't been running long. All fans appeared to be running including the one on the gpu.

Haven't frozen up yet....had it running for about 2 hours with some graphics intensive things and no problems. I just don't feel like I fixed anything hehe =)

 

[Fureya]

Ok so I get to http://www.computer-and-printer-reviews.com/images/ixp10.png
there.

I know its going to crash/freeze because the little blue bar at the bottom goes all pixellated when it starts moving across the screen. It kinda scatters.
Then the entire system reboots automatically and asks me if I want to boot into safe mode or not.