Radeon HD 3870 Problem (I think)

RMA the card?

Freezing on the desktop? could be a driver issue try uninstalling and then reinstalling drivers

If its crashing during games... its possible its overheating.... despite the fact you watched temperatures overnight... while not doing anything... idle temps don't mean anything btw

My bet is on software/drivers being wacky but its possible your gpu is overheating, while the card is out look at the heatsink see if you can see between the heatsink and the card... if you can thats probably not good   if you can't then examine it and see how dusty it is

Yeah it crashed while i was playing WoW the very first time, which i thought was overheating, or psu or something, but then it crashed when i had started it up again and i wasn't even doing anything... lol i didnt really sit there and watch the temperature all night, i was multitasking with homework and various things but i have dual display so i was continually watching my temperature till i went to bed and shut it off.

I installed the card back in my comp after running off onboard flawlessly for about 2 hours, and it seems to be doing alright, i downloaded rivatuner, hella better than speedfan when looking at my gpu temp. Im thinking about trying to overload it, while keeping this temperature gage on my other monitor, but if it does overheat and freeze, what do you think i should do? because i have a smilodon case with 2x 80mm fans and 2x 120mm fans and its been running for almost 3 months without any heating problems...

The card isnt really dusty yet, had a tiny bit of dust but none now, and i dont think i can see through the heatsink so i think thats okay lol.

oh and heres the kicker, back when i first got my new system, i "multiboxed" a total of 6 WoWs while testing to see if i could push it, 6 WoW applications running simultaneously at avg of 20 fps, and it didnt so much as burp... so this is really buggin that it could be a heating issue now.

Edit***
Wow just got a random restart 5 mins after posting this... it was running at 44-45C and the GPU usage was barely 1% this is really buggin, im going to check for updates or something.

  reinstalled the drivers and the whole catalyst suite, downloaded a 64bit edition off their site, uhh ran WoW to see to and push it to see if it would freeze or restart, and i got a bsod, a physical memory dump... i think maybe the memory on the card is bad..