Did my system overheat O.o?

So, I was playing some League of Legends today on my moderate PC, the specs aren't great, but it runs what I need it to, while I'm collecting parts for my new beast.

I've never had an overheating problem, but I think my rig overheated.

I was playing a match, and right at the end the power just shut off, everything else plugged into that surge protector was working fine, the system just beeped and boom, gone.
I tried to turn it back on but I got a blank screen and a long beep from the computer.

I opened up the case and it was hot as hell in there (I couldn't touch the GPU for longer than .5 seconds.)

After Waiting a few hours, I decided to plug it back in and it's working just fine, how would I go about finding out exactly what happened? I'm sure something over-heated, since I've noticed one of my fans stopped working as well (gonna grab a new one tomorrow.) and the fact that it was actually a hot day here in washington didn't help.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Really does sound like overheating, ya.

I'm not much of a techy, but I used to have some serious heat troubles with my laptop. You can try getting a program that monitors the GPU temperatures (and other temps) and just keep an eye on it.

There should be a set limit to how hot your computer can get before it emergency shuts down, so if you can find the limit for yours you could always give it a little stress test. Good to know that it IS shutting down, anyway. My laptop just kept going. >_>

Usually if it's an overheating problem you'll notice lagging and fragments in the game. If it just shut off suddenly without any warning signs, it sounds more like your PSU failed.

It depends on what was overheating -- GPU overheating will lead to the graphic artifacts, but CPU heating will just shut down.

You can try installing speedfan ( http://www.almico.com/sfscreenshots.php ) to monitor your CPU temps and fan speeds (it would have notified you that one of your fans had died as well).

fuzzygeek wrote:It depends on what was overheating -- GPU overheating will lead to the graphic artifacts, but CPU heating will just shut down.

You can try installing speedfan ( http://www.almico.com/sfscreenshots.php ) to monitor your CPU temps and fan speeds (it would have notified you that one of your fans had died as well).

GPU operations are directly related to the CPU, CPU overheating tends to cause graphical artifacts as well.

I'm not sure what I was thinking since I hadn't had any coffee yet, but yes, my bad. I personally have never seen graphic artifacts from anything other than an overheading GPU, but I'm always very, very careful with CPU cooling.

Jeremoot wrote:Usually if it's an overheating problem you'll notice lagging and fragments in the game. If it just shut off suddenly without any warning signs, it sounds more like your PSU failed.

Yeah I was getting framerate issues in LoL.

So it was the GPU, Thanks for the advice, Admittedly, I don't know a lot about Hardware problems, so thanks.

Since you're on it, buy an compressed air canister and blow it into the gpu/cpu fans to unclog it, open the side of the case and if possible, put a fan blowing into it.

In general, overheating is caused by clogging of the fans for pcs<3 years old. If it still keeps on doing it and you're not afraid of it, I'd say open up the GPU and remove and reinstall the thermal paste on the core and the pads on the ram