Temporary freezing during games!

Heyo,

I've been having a problem I haven't been able to track down the cause of, or the solution to. Whenever I play a game, after a random amount of time my audio cuts out, and then the computer and game becomes unresponsive. I can't ctrlaltdel or anything during this time. After a minute or two the computer becomes responsive again. I haven't been able to track down any specific cause for this to be happening.

At first i thought since the audio was cutting out a second or two before the freeze that is was an audio card driver issue. I had a Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS installed as well as the onboard audio. I physically removed the Soundblaster card and attempted to see if the issue persisted which it did. I then disabled and uninstalled (in device manager) the onboard audio and tested without any audio devices and the problem still persists. I've tried video card drivers as well, with no luck. I'm currently running a memory test and everything looks ok there.

I then started thinking that maybe my GPU was overheating. I ran a stability test using furmark and everything seemed fine, GPU temps didn't reach over 80degrees. Also while running the stability test the problem did not occur.

I'm running out of ideas so any help is appreciated!

PC Specs:
Core2Duo E6600
EVGA 680i mobo
EVGA 8800GTS 640mb
Patriot Viper RAM 4gb

Thanks in advance!

Have you tried older drivers? I had extremely poor performance on my 9500GT until I used old drivers.

Uninstall your video drivers and reboot Windows 7.
Windows will start and hopefully install its own video drivers.
Try those.

Yeah I've tried a few older versions of drivers all with no luck. I even reformatted again and it's still happening. I ran Furmark to check temps while under load and everything appears within normal operating temperatures. I'm not experiencing any artifacts on screen during the feezes, and as I said after a minute or two everything will work again. It's devesating in Online games tho as i timeout from the servers.

I am completely stumped as to what could be happening. I'm thinking about digging out my vista disc and testing under vista to see if I have the same issues...

Okay well maybe you should try that because it may be a problem with your hardware if the problem persists. Your PSU looks powerful enough, maybe there is a problem with your graphics card hardware. If you have access to another card, try that. Also, is it happening in all your games or just a select few? Which ones?

I only ran Memtest for an hour or two :S Will running it for longer make much difference? And yeah I used Orthos and everything seemed fine. I've downclocked my CPU now, but haven't had a chance to see if its still crashing in games yet. I'll test it later tonight and hopefully it will have solved the problem :)

Update: I ran memtest for 24 hours and had no errors. Even with the downclocking it's still happening.