black screen lock up on games

this only started to happen within the past day, whenever i would be playing arma 2 the screen would freeze then go to a black screen with nothing on it, i then updated my graphics driver as i was using a 320 version(do not know which one) and now i cant even get batman: arkham city to go past the click to start menu.

i can start my PC and arkham city but every time i get to the main screen right before i can choose my save file i can see graphics tearing and black blocks flickering on batman and then black screen of death making me force my computer to reboot.

had a similar problem happen on elder scrolls V: skyrim right before i started having problems on batman, screen locks up then goes black then comes back and locks up again just to go black again. after that PC became unresponsive. i then booted into safe mode after downloading the latest NVIDIA driver executable uninstalled my current driver and then installed the newest drivers in safe mode. restarted the computer and attempted to start batman arkham city and the same thing is happening.

my PC is roughly a year and a half old without a reformat currently and with the way things are looking i may have to reformat. reaching out on here to see if anyone can help me with this problem before it becomes a must. this problem is happening on both of my GTX 670's in SLI mode or running them solo.

ok i will do it in about 10 min from this post, then report back if it worked or not.

well i had everything typed out and accidentally closed the browser instead of a single tab

i followed your steps and i am no longer having the visual problems as described in starting post.

the first time i removed my drivers, before i signed up on the site and asked for help, and installed the new ones i did almost everything you said except one thing which may have been the entire problem. i installed the up to date drivers in safe mode instead of booting normally.

i ran arkham city for 2 minutes before closing it to post this and had no problems, i will mark the thread as solved if i do not have any more problems after 1-2 hours of testing.

as for my GPU temps i have EVGA precision X , both cards are EVGA brand, and use that for custom fan controlling at set temp levels. the only time i have seen the temps go above 80c is when i run heaven benchmark 4.0 on max settings without 3D and multi monitor settings multiple times. none of my games i own run my cards higher then 80c.

not my exact post i had the first time i closed it but it explains it.

thank you for the help on this, i would not have figured out the 1 flaw in what i did wrong when i installed the drivers myself.

sadly the problem is persisting. i did not have SLI enabled when i first launched arkham city and just turned SLI on and i get the visual tearing then the black screen and my computer will not respond to anything but hitting the hard reset button.

i am now testing my cards separately with SLI turned off.
card 1 has no tearing and no crash, testing card 2 now.

neither card working alone has any problems so i may need to reconnect the bridge and see if it works or not. turning PC off to re-seat the bridge.