Screen periodically turns black during gameplay then comes back on

[KWulf]

So this has been happening for quite some time now. While in game in almost every game, my screen will periodically freeze and turn black, then after a few seconds come back on to renew game play. This ONLY happens when I am in-game, not while anything else is happening on my computer. During this I can still hear audio from all sources but the game itself. The frequency of this varies from game to game, and some are even free of the problem, but it's become very tiresome. I've tried everything I could think of to fix the problem, including backdating and updating my drivers, but I'm no expert. I can only assume this has something to do with my card, any help would be appreciated

I've got 8 gigs of ram, an Nvidia Geforce GTX 660, CPU is a 2x 3200 MHz, couldn't tell you about the motherboard other than it came with the factory built tower.

 

[Mellon Head]

Are you running the fan speed at automatic? I was having the same problem with my Radeon HD 7770 when the fan speed was set to auto. Going to a manual fan speed of 60% solved the problem and my GPU runs a lot cooler. Go into your Nvidia control panel and try setting the fan speed above 50% and play your game, bump it higher if you still get black screens. It makes your PC a little louder, but it's better than damaging your card with excess heat.

I don't think that the automatic fan speed modes work on either Radeon or Nvidia cards in the last few sets of drivers, based on the forum complaints that I've been reading lately.