Black Screen & High speed fans

[rivacom]

So hoping maybe someone has run into this before. Kind took me by surprise as I've never had so many pieces of hardware act funny at once. So my computer has acted fine up until Monday night, I heard all the fans in it(4 Case fans, CPU and GPU) kick up to probably the highest setting. I turned it off and rebooted and it worked fine for the night and most of yesterday. I had to turn it off again to move the PC and when I booted back up hours later, I was be able to use it for a few minutes and the Monitors would all turn black(sometimes theres some funny rainbow pixelation in a very small spot on the screen) and the fans would kick up to high again. So again I rebooted, however this happens non stop now, reboot same thing. Quick google search and I saw some people say Graphics card and some say Motherboard. But I'm hoping it's maybe just a setting I can change or default back to.

My PC has never been overclocked, GFX card is stock everything and it has been running normal since before the new year.

Asrock z77 Extreme4 Motherboard
Intel i5 3570K
Gskill Ares 2 x4GB of Ram 1600
Crucial M4 128GB Drive.
SAPPHIRE FleX 100312FLEX Radeon HD 6950 2GB 256-bit GDDR5

Any ideas?

 

[roaf85]

I suppose you have no way to test the video card or onboard video on the board right?

If your board has onboard video, by pass the graphics card and take it out of the machine and test the onboard video, see if you run into the same symptoms?

It sounds like the board though.

 

[oldskoolluva]

There's a nasty little bitcoin miner virus going around that causes those same symptoms as well. It usually installs itself from something downloaded and mainly affects AMD/ATI gpu's, but can infect N'vdia as well. I noticed my gpu fan running extremely high even at idle, as soon as pc was booted its resources would be at almost 100% and the gpu would crash to black screen or as soon as I ran anything intensive like a game it would go to a black screen. Check your c:\ drive's temp folder for IEUtil.exe / Iehighutil.exe. If you see either of those files then you have the virus and need to remove all traces of it. Delete the files and the temp folder immediately. Check your processes in task manager and you will see it running as enabled. You will also have to check your startup in msconfig and delete it there as well. Check registry and delete any references there. Use hijackthis, Malwarebytes or similar to scan your pc and remove all traces. Its hit and miss with AV software apparently. I was using Windows 8 built in AV and it never picked it up. Switched over to Comodo Internet Security and it found it right away... Good luck!