could this be caused by overheating???

so, i have a media centre pc that i've been running for the past year without any real issues. The last couple of months have been with Windows 7. Its a 780g amd system, and i am using the oinboard gpu with hdmi.

A couple of nights ago when watching a dvd i got a strange crash where the picture became 'blocky' and the pc unresponsive.

A restart was fine in boot-up (bios etc) but when windows began to load I got a screen that looked like static after the windows logo. I presume this was when the ATI drivers kicked in. This happened on a few restarts, but when left off overnight it worked again perfectly in the morning.

Its just happened again, and i'm wondering if the onboard gpu is overheating. So my questions are is this the sort of symptom to expect from gpu overheating? Are there any other obvious possibilities that spring to mind?and is there anyway to test this without rma-ing the motherboard??

below is a photo of the 'static' if that helps! :). If not you could just stare a it for a while and see the magic hidden picture....

http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/5607/dsc0205g.jpg

You could touch the heatsink that is on the onboard graphics chip and see how hot it is when this happens.

Possibly. It's certainly an unhappy GPU. What temps are you getting ?

i cant seem to get GPU temps, not sure if it has a monitor on it. CPUID hardware monitor doesnt recognise the card to get the temps. Temps across the rest of the system are fine.

I didn't know that CPUID looked at the GPu as well...
I would have suggested something like GPUZ or Everest Ultimate.
http://forums.hexus.net/current-barg...mate-free.html

Have you got another graphics card you could test? That would eliminate the rest of the system.

I dont have one at home, but there is probably one at work i can borrow from a seldom used system. I'll give that a try over the weekend. I've cleaned the gpu drivers from the system, reinstalled, and ran a few graphics stress tests. Seems stable under stress, seems strange that it overheated whilst just playing a dvd.