Computer freezes during installations

[Mardelitron]

Right, I recently assembled a PC with entirely secondhand components. It worked fine for a short while but after about a month it would not boot. We had suspected the motherboard to be a problem component (fortunately it was free) so we replaced it with a brand new Sabertooth 990FX. After a clean install of windows it seemed to be working well enough.

But when I tried to install the ASUS AI suite, it froze and upon rebooting gave me an error message. Something along the lines of "unsuitable 16 bit software". It was odd but I dismissed it as a software fault, there are alternatives to AI Suite. Then, I tried to install Dark Souls 2. It installed fine but while it was running first time set up it froze and needed to restart. It always freezes at the stage "Installing DirectX".

I don't know what is causing the problem but I imagine it is a hardware fault of some kind, but a software problem is not out of the picture. If anyone has an idea of what I could do to fix it I'd be most grateful.

Upon close inspection I was unable to find the DxDiag tool. Is it possible my computer has no version of DirectX installed? Any attempts to install it have not worked.

 

[Mardelitron]

DirectX is a core part of Windows. I am going to guess your issue is going to be GPU or PSU. do you have a spare to swap in?

I have a spare graphics card somewhere, It's old but I can see if it works nonetheless. I'll go look for it and see what that does.

 

[Mardelitron]

Just tried with the old graphics card, It booted up but then froze while installing the graphics card drivers.