Windows 7 freezing during gameplay after clean installation

I reinstalled windows recently and since day 1 it has been freezing in certain games constantly. my drivers are fine, I have directx, .NET and all that installed, I'm not overclocking, it's not the power supply, and my PC is never under extreme stress when it happens.

the games it happens on:
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Natural Selection 2
Tomb Raider
Far Cry 2


My Specs:
EVGA GTX 670
AMD FX-8150 x8
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3
8 GB RAM
Windows 7 x64
Corsair 500w PSU

how can I diagnose and fix the problem?

Test the hardware, assure you have a Clean Boot, check the logs for repeat errors to resolve, utilize the System Resources in Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7 to see if you can resolve the hang.

Win7 should never hang or bog on adequate, tested hardware with a perfect install. So check over the steps to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 to see how what you did compares.

gregrocker said:

Test the hardware, assure you have a Clean Boot, check the logs for repeat errors to resolve, utilize the System Resources in Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7 to see if you can resolve the hang.

Win7 should never hang or bog on adequate, tested hardware with a perfect install. So check over the steps to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 to see how what you did compares.

I'm fairly confident it's not the hardware since all of it is relatively new and never gave me problems before I reinstalled windows, and considering that the freezing happens on some really non-stressful games and doesn't happen on extremely taxing games it wouldn't make any sense for it to be a hardware problem. I don't know where windows stores logs about crashes, I've looked at the event viewer and all it tells me is ''the last shutdown was unexpected''. I don't know what you mean by ''assure you have a clean boot''.

edit: looking at the link you provided I know what you meant now, the only things I have in my startup are steam, skype and Xbox 360 accessories.

Did you hew closely to the steps for getting a perfect install? Particularly important is that drivers in Win7 are handled differently than XP, fully automated via the installer and optional Updates. So none should be imported unless they're missing after all rounds of Important and Optional Updates are done.

The Troubleshooting Steps will normally reveal clues once all the steps are worked through.

gregrocker said:

Did you hew closely to the steps for getting a perfect install? Particularly important is that drivers in Win7 are handled differently than XP, fully automated via the installer and optional Updates. So none should be imported unless they're missing after all rounds of Important and Optional Updates are done.

The Troubleshooting Steps will normally reveal clues once all the steps are worked through.

yeah all drivers were manually installed afterwards. the only things that were imported were application files that were all put in a folder called windows.old automatically and I didn't import anything from that, I just deleted it. aside from that it was a completely clean installation.

What do you mean by

all drivers were manually installed afterwards

.
Did you read what I just wrote? You should use only the drivers given by the installer and updated via Windows Updates after enabling Automatically deliver drivers via Windows Update (Step 3).

gregrocker said:

What do you mean by

all drivers were manually installed afterwards

.
Did you read what I just wrote? You should use only the drivers given by the installer and updated via Windows Updates after enabling Automatically deliver drivers via Windows Update (Step 3).

windows doesn't distribute the proper graphics drivers and I couldn't use windows update to begin with without manually installing drivers for my motherboard.

Are all Important and Optional Updates installed?

Work through the Troubleshooting Steps to gather clues. If you report back results we may have other steps.

For many of problems that looks like what you are talking about, the RAM often is at fault.
There is 2 ways that i know of on how to check your RAM.

The fast way:

Since you have 8 GB i`m assuming you got 2x 4G sticks? Take 1 out and let the machine run, Start a game or what nuts. and if nothing happens swap it out for the other one and see if the machine crash.

The slower but more accurate way:

Download a program called Memtest. Hopefully some one can tell you more about that program ( i myself have not used it)