Monitor shuts down as if hardware is overheating, but it's not.

DaveMc617

Honorable
Jun 5, 2012
4
0
10,510
Alright, so here's my problem:

I started playing Metro:2033 for the first time in months today, and after mere minutes of playing, the monitor shut down and showed a message that no input was detected. When this happened, the sound coming through my headphones hiccuped a bit, then died out. After this, the LEDs on the tower remained on, so I figured the computer itself was still on; I tried turning the monitor off and then back on, alt+tabbing out of the game, and ctrl+alt+del, but nothing got the display to go through the monitor.

I figured it could have been an isolated incident so I restarted and put on Metro again... and it was a repeat of the same thing just minutes into playing. Thinking the problem might stem from a conflict between the game and my drivers due to a recent update or something, I tried Civ 5 to see if the problem repeated itself; it did.

So now, I decided to pop open the tower and clean out the built up dust etc. (there wasn't a tremendous buildup, in fact, it looked pretty good for not being cleaned up in months). I booted back up and played the game, this time playing for about an hour and a half before deciding to wrap it up for a little while before playing again later.

Well right now is later, and minutes into playing it happened again. I decided to monitor what kind of temps i'm getting on my hardware while playing the game (and right before the monitor died out again), and each core of the CPU was steady around 35-45 degrees Celsius, and right before it happened the GPU was a little over 80 degrees Celsius. To put that in perspective, my GPU is running at 56 degrees right now on the web, and the cpu cores are at 28-30 degrees. According to my knowledge, these temps aren't really near what they would be in order for the the computer to shut itself down to protect itself from any damage, and even if it did that, wouldn't it shutdown altogether and not leave the LEDs on?

My specs are: AMD Phenom II X6 1100T for a processor, and a Radeon HD6950 for the GPU.

Thanks in advance for any insight into my problem.