I beg your pardon, but exactly which part of "something funny happening right now with my hardware" was too complicated to comprehend...? Mea culpa, I said as much, as for the symptoms: there was nothing else to report beyond "it crashes, hard". Not that anyone would have a reason to care at this point, but some part of re-seating the video card, re-plugging every single power lead and replacing the hardened northbridge/southbridge thermal pads with fresh paste seems to have solved the issue. Possibly, maybe. At least it deigns to start now, and I can't produce the crash with the GPU stress test anymore the way I used to. The default settings are still sufficient to raise the temperature of the entire video card right next to that of the surface of the Sun in mere seconds though (one can clearly feel the "whoosh" simply holding one's hand over the card in the case), which is utterly hilarious for a basically single-model scene, but we're not supposed to skill-shame around here so there's that. Now kindly go and get righteously outraged at someone else who gives a shit, please...