PC freezes after a random amount of time from successful boot after dust cleaning.

[bellner]

So my fans have been noticeably louder the past week so today I decided to open my PC up and try and clear out any dust that the fans have gathered up. Im gonna be honest and say that I have not done this since the last time I swapped motherboard and thats probably 3 years ago at least.

So I open it up and here is where I did 2 mistakes that I know of. I completly remove the cpu cooler and too nobodys surprise the thermal paste was dried up and i've heard somewhere that once you remove the cooler you have to swap the paste and I didnt have any at home. Anyways I remove any dust from the fan and "metal sheets" and when I was about to put it back I realized that the ram was in the way so I removed them and here is where I did mistake nr 2.... I put all 4 ram sticks on the chassis side panel thats made out of metal.

 

Anyways I put everything back together and everything boots fine but I notice that my cpu was running much hotter now.

 

I have an old i7 2600k that I have had OC to 4.2MHz for the past year with no thermal issues or crashes (stock 3.4MHz) but now I run the PC for about an hour playing some pubg and I notice that my cpu is at 97 degrees celsius so I quickly lower my coreclock to 4.0 but it still runs hot and here is where the first crash happens, everything goes black and the computer restarts. So I lower it to 3.8 and now the temp is never above 85 celsius during load but it still keeps crashing so I reset cmos by removing the power cord and holding down the start button for 1min then I go into bios and reset everything so now everything is at stock settings and the temp is around 30 celsius during web browsing but the computer still randomly freezes and I have to use the kill-switch or it just shuts down and reboots by itself and I cant find any correlation for when it happens, sometimes 10min after boot and only web browsing, sometimes after 1h of gameplay.

 

what ive tried so far:

 

Ran a windows memory diagnostic but it found no issues
I open the computer up again and doubble checked that all cables where correctly connected
And as stated before I reset cmos and bios settings.

 

Sometimes after a crash when I boot up again I can hear in my headphones that windows boots to desktop but its as if my monitors are not connected and it requires several reboots / leaving the PC shut off for a while and then I get a successful boot again.

 

Sorry for long post but im having a hard time explaining it shorter without leaving out crucial information

[mockedarche]

Well.. you know the issue you need to clean and apply new thermal paste? I highly suggest you don't run the pc until you do so unless you want to fry your chip.

[bellner]

Yeah I have ordered some but thermals cant be the issue atm, currently while writing this my temps are between 30-35 celsius while idle and around 60 while im in games and it still crashes and its should not do that from those temps right? 

 

Im currently closely monitoring temps at all time and everything seems fine.