Crashing/Freezing

Hi. I am having a problem with my system crashing/freezing randomly. What happens is that the screen and cursor freezes and the sound skips (repeats) rapidly. The only way to get out is to shut down the pc manually.

It usually happens when running games (i.e. Sins of a Solar Empire, Civilization IV).

I have the latest video and audio drivers and my DirectX is updated as well.

I'm also wondering if this could be an overheating problem. At rest (typical usage) SpeedFan says my GPU temp is 67 C, and some of my CPU cores periodically reach in excess of 50 C. I'm not sure whether or not that's normal...

Here are my specs:
Gateway LX6810-01
Intel Core 2 Quad 2.3 Ghz Q8200
NVidia GT 120 1 GB
8 GB RAM
640 GB HDD

Thanks for any help you can provide.

P.S. This is a brand new computer, and tech support has not been much help so far. They are suggesting a wipe and reload, so I may try that.

Thanks for the response.

I put some load on the computer and the temps raised to 81 for the GPU and 57 for the CPU. Is that still normal? What should the temps be?

This was only after about a minute, though. My problems usually don't occur until after the computer has been running for a few hours.

Did anyone ever come up with a solution for this? I have the same machine with the same exact problems, only mine will freeze when I'm not even using it. I just return from a breaqk and find video, but am unable to get any response. If the screen saver is not on I can even see the time of the freeze on the system clock. The only way out is a hard restart. Once I lost some data, I became somewhat leery about usinng this machime for anything serious. I cannot listen to any audio as it continuously stutters whether downloaded or direct from CD. Once I tried to open a simple program not long after restarting and received an error message that I didn't have anough resources available. I had nothing else running. I could even do a standard restart.