All games crash unless I set affinity - 2 cores

Starcraft 2, Company of Heroes and now it looks like Dragon Age 2 as well.

Basically, every game crashes unless I set affinity to 2 cores, the crashes actually look like graphics crashes but it is always fixed by setting affinity to 2 cores, the graphics will go weird often accompanied by horrible noises from the speakers too.

I can maybe understand the affinity-fix with older games like Dragon Age Origins and CoH, but SC2 and DA2 are pretty new.

Only using 2 cores in DA2 is a pretty big performance hit and a waste of the cpu so that particularly annoys me.

Has anyone ever heard or experienced this? Any ideas what is going on?

Sound, GPU and DirectX are all up to date. Not sure about chipset, I will check. Thanks. :)

OK, everything is up to date now, I only have DA2 installed atm and playing it at just below the highest settings seemed to be working anyway, it crashes at the highest settings even though it is just about playable.

The problem might have been that I undervolt my CPU slightly, I assumed it was fine as it passes OCCT, Prime95 and other stability tests for hours - but maybe it aint so I have raised the voltage.

Thanks. :)

I re-installed DAO and it started crashing again if you Google "site:social.bioware.com processor affinity", you will see there lots of threads about setting affinity to 1 core if you have dual core and 2 cores if you have a quad-core. Some of the results are for mass effect 2 as well. So, it does seem to be a well known thing.

I now have all the latest drivers, I am not overclocking/underclocking. I do remember whan I had a dual core that setting it to 1 core helped, I am about to try setting my quad-core to 2 cores and see if that helps.

It is really working man, i had no crashing anymore while im playing since i set affinity 2 cores for games that im playing. Thanks so much