Games keep freezing and crashing

[noxnoctum]

Alright ever since I bought a 4650 to replace my old Nvidia Geforce 7900gs I get freezes and crashes in certain games. The two worst I can think of by far are Silent Storm (old RTT game from 2004) and Achtung Panzer: Kharkov which is a recent release. It happens occasionally in most of my games though, old and new. With those 2 though it's like every 30 minutes. Sometimes the "VPU recover" thing happens and I can get back in, other times I get a BSD.

I have used driver sweeper to clean out all the drivers, and have installed latest drivers.

As an aside, one person suggested I update PSU drivers (I also got a slightly more powerful PSU to support the 4650)... I didn't even know you could do this... could this be the issue? I have a Corsair PSU.

thanks for any help, this is really driving me crazy.

EDIT: I notice also I have Nvidia PhysX installed... is this causing a conflict? I can't remember which game, but one made me install that.

 

[wolfram23]

PhysX shouldn't be an issue, some games use "passive" PhysX such as NFS: Shift and will not run without the drivers.
It sounds to me like a video card memory issue. I've had the same thing happen after overclocking. In fact, just 10 minutes ago I dropped my GPU memory OC from 1200 to 1190 after Cryostasis and then Penumbra both froze/crashed.

The thing is, you're probably on stock GPU settings, so you can try underclocking the GPU memory by 10mhz and see if that helps. Possibly giving it a little more voltage would help if that's possible (not all cards can be volt modded).

Otherwise, if possible you should try to exchange it for a different card as it might be a bad one.

Oh, well I guess it could also be motherboard incompatibility or something. Have you updated the mobo BIOS?

 

[noxnoctum]

How do I update the BIOS?

I'll try the underclocking thing, thanks that's a good suggestion. I haven't been OCing it at all though so that's strange... I did a bit for the first 2 weeks but didn't notice much performance increase so I just put it back at default.

How I would I go about underclocking it?

thanks guys