Computer crashing in strange way but only sometimes?

OK, so about a month ago i brought dark souls 3 and around 5 minutes into playing the game, my monitor displayed the "No connection found screen" and my headset cut off all my sound. I was on discord at the time and the people in the call said i just disconnected without saying anything. I know it's not discord because this error has happened multiple times without discord being open.
This has happened across some games, most recently the Overwatch Open Beta, Dark Souls 3, Black Ops 3. I have never received this error before and it never happens in some games, such as league of legends, Nidhogg and other seemingly random games. My specs aren't bad and I've had no problems running Black Ops 3 before this error happened the first time.
My Hard drive in the task manager window spikes at 100 sometimes, but then goes back to 0 for at least a while. I've never had the chance to look at the task manager window when crashing, as I'm always in-game. This seems random to me when it happens, because I've played a near 7 hour session with absolutely no crashes,and sometimes it can crash 3-4 times in 30 minutes.
The only way I've found to get my computer working again after the crash is to hold the power button until the unit turns off, then turn it back on.

I found the problem and it's that my GPU is getting to 80 degrees+ within like a minute of starting the game and subsequently crashes because of the ridiculous heat. I have opened the side panel of my computer, turned my fans to max speed and it still crashes in less than a minute. I'v cleaned out any dust, scanned for viruses and cleaned my start-up programs. Nothing specific seems to be using anything above 1% in task manager and my gpu is spiking between 60-80% then back down to 0% every few seconds, even while idling.

your fan speed is at 100% and it's not cooling it enough? GPU's can get to 90c without breaking a sweat usually, mine often goes beyond 85c and doesn't struggle, I fear it's something else to blame.

MrNeeds said:

your fan speed is at 100% and it's not cooling it enough? GPU's can get to 90c without breaking a sweat usually, mine often goes beyond 85c and doesn't struggle, I fear it's something else to blame.

Badly cooled case is usually to blame for high heat.

sevenfolder27 said:

I opened the side of my case and put a normal fan next to it, and it was still overheating. I spoke to my old computing teacher and he suggested that it might be a power supply problem. I have a workaround by capping the games at 30 fps, but with the new DOOM game 30 fps seems to crash the game for an unknown reason, so this workaround is not universal.

Anyone else think this "workaround" is a pretty bad idea ? :-/

zztemp said:

Anyone else think this "workaround" is a pretty bad idea ? :-/

I do. It can be only temporary thing, in the long run any excessive heat is damaging.
First thing would be to find exact source of the heat. CPU, GPU chipset, VRM etc. No amount of case cooling can substitute for cooling a component that is a true source of overheating.