3d games hang, then screen goes black, then return to normal, very often

[mrpavone]

Hello, All
Hope you can help me with this mistery.
The PC works perfectly. But, on 3d games it happens very often (about 1 time per minute) that the game freezes, then after a few seconds the screen turns black, then the game returns from where it stopped like nothing happened. Sometimes, it freezes, then I go ctrl+alt+del/task manager and it returns automatically to the game. Sometimes the games stops responding and have to be killed. I was living along with this problem, that have been happening for a few months now. It happens in various games. Dishonored, Borderlands, Rage, Alan Wake. So the problem is obviously not related to an specific game, need of a patch, etc.
But now I bought a game (Saints Row the third Steam version) that freezes and crashes to desktop when the problem happens, so I am trying to find a solution.
My setup is: AMD Phenom II Quad, 4GB RAM, motherboard ASUS M4A88T-V, nVIDIA GTS450, Win 7 Ultimate.
Follows a list of the procedures I tried already:
DxDiag complained that quartz.dll was corrupted. I corrected it, now DxDiag show everything as Ok.
I tried to reinstall DirectX, but the installer says that I already have a newer DirectX version installed. I tried to uninstall DirectX but couldn't. Seems that you need to buy a US$30,00 software to do that.
I erased the NVIDIA drivers with Driver Sweeper and installed an older version of the NVIDIA drivers.
I even installed a brand new win 7 on a new partition and the problem persisted.
Hope someone can help.

 

[smorizio]

could be your system running out of ram. 4g is not a lot to run games on. the other issue could be your power supply in under powered and causing your system to lock up. post your size and make of your power supply's.

 

[mrpavone]

could be your system running out of ram. 4g is not a lot to run games on. the other issue could be your power supply in under powered and causing your system to lock up. post your size and make of your power supply's.

The power supply is a Wisecase WSNG-500W-1X8
The manufacturer says it is real 500W of capacity.

 

[swifty_morgan]

are you sure it's not a real 220watt PS? what does it say for amps under 12voly?.......... pull side off case and look.

can you run the game at lower resolution?

uninstall the nvidia drivers/restart/do a custom install and only install the gaphics driver.

///////////////////// ............ First thing to do.......... go into the

BIOS and disable the Hybrid crossfire mumbo jumbo.

 

[mrpavone]

are you sure it's not a real 220watt PS? what does it say for amps under 12voly?.......... pull side off case and look.

It's 35A under 12V, that makes 420W. I guess the other 80W are distributed among the other outputs.

can you run the game at lower resolution?

It makes no difference. The problem still happens. Also tried to use DX9 instead of DX11 (when available), still the same.

uninstall the nvidia drivers/restart/do a custom install and only install the gaphics driver.

I'll try this later, if the following don't work:

///////////////////// ............ First thing to do.......... go into the

BIOS and disable the Hybrid crossfire mumbo jumbo.

The board doesn't have SLI nor Crossfire, however I found an option called "GPU booster". It seems that the MB fiddles with the GPU clock trying to overclock it. I disabled it. Tomorrow I'll see what happens.

 

[mrpavone]

Best answer selected by mrpavone.