Computer failure troubleshooting brainstorming

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

My nephew has a computer that is doing the following - after a few minutes of playing a video game, the video will cut out.

It appears that the computer is still working. Video never returns.
The video card, an Nvidia GTX 970, never gets to a point where the fans start to run.
We swapped power supplies to a better one.

Ok, now that I am typing this out, I am pretty sure we swapped CPU and motherboard. So it has to be the card.

I can't remember if this happened on the other card we had in there or not. Now that I am home and thinking correctly, that is the first thing we should have tried.

Well, I am glad I typed all this out. I'll call him tomorrow and see if the other video card did the same thing or not.

[objectinspace]

Teach him to use the computer without a screen.

[RealNC]

the video will cut out.
...
The video card, an Nvidia GTX 970, never gets to a point where the fans start to run.

Those two things sound awfully related. If the fans don't start to run while playing video games, then they're not doing their job. If they don't spin during a video game, then there's nothing else that could make them spin.

[Jizaboz]

PSU or GPU is toast. Swap PSU first, see if it still shits out.. then get new video card if if it does. My friend with an AMD/Radeon setup just encountered this same issue and it was his GPU.

[Casual Observer]

Speaking of computer failures, has anyone ever had a situation where their computer would several times a day stop allowing you to click on different tabs or applications until you hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and click the task manager link not once but twice in order to fix the problem? I did the 13 hour "reset" thing with Win 10 and it behaves a little better about too many Chrome tabs open but it's still doing this inexplicable thing. I'm getting that nothing short of a re-format and re-install will possibly fix this but I'm literally baffled about why it's doing this thing. Nothing about it as far as I can tell on the internet. I bet that damn Fortinet client fucked up my registry.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I haven't had that, but we did confirm that this is the ONLY video card he had had trouble with. Since he doesn't come here, I am probably going to get him a 3060 in a couple months.