Subgenius

Godspeed you OP! I ducking love you! Created an account just to thank you. I've been dealing with this for over an year, it was super annoying but I could always tweak things so that it would work poorly but work nonetheless. But earlier today I tried watching a video on YouTube (1080p 60fps) and the whole black-screen lock with the fans going at max speed happened again. It's summer over here and it's pretty hot but still, it was just a video. Proceeded to open the case and clean it, thinking there could be cat hair clogging some fan/heat-sink. Try to play the same video, fans go louder and louder and once again, around 15 seconds in, it locks. Thinking this isn't normal and someone has had to experience the same problem before I google it once again but this time, I find this thread and decide to crack open my MSI Radeon R9 290X to check and lo and behold, besides the insane amount of dirt that was behind the plastic, all of the thermal paste was rock solid and most of it was on the board. Cleaned the whole thing, applied new paste and it feels like I have a new rig. I could watch that video without my fans going mad. Launched Path of Exile (most GPU intensive game I have) and it ran at stable 60 fps with low fan speeds. And most importantly, I turned GPU acceleration back on in Adobe Premiere and AfterEffects (with which I work every day) and everything works flawlessly and quietly. No more subpar workflow. So thank you, thank you, thank you! In retrospective, cracking the GPU open and taking a look inside was the obvious thing to do but it never occurred to me before.