Problems with gaming: graphics freeze / flashing back frames

[mkl]

Hi,

Whilst playing games my computer sometimes flashes some black frames followed by a short freeze. The games I don't experience this problem with usually freeze completely, and require tabbing out and back to the game (full screen) to recover, but are 100% stuck if I'm playing windowed.

I've changed my graphics card, but the problem persists - I've also ran some memtests but no errors were found. Furmark's stress tests don't cause any problems nor errors.

What's most likely to cause these sorts of problems? Any simple further tests I should try?

Thanks a lot!

Additional info:

ASUS P5Q Intel P45 Socket 775 ATX Motherboard
OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 Reaper HPC 4GB Edition (2x2048MB)
Zalman ZM850-HP, 850W ATX Power Supply
XFX Geforce 9800 GTX+
Inter Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66GHz

 

[HippieMagic]

What games? This sounds like some of the 275.33 driver issues in games like Bad Company 2.

 

[mkl]

Super Meat Boy, Fable 3, Live for Speed, Team Fortress 2 along with random mmorpgs are the ones I've tried so far. Had problems with every game excluding Jolly Rover (a 2D adventure game).

The other graphics card I tried was an Asus GeForce GT 520 Silent.

 

[HippieMagic]

Have you tried using an older driver? I recently had to roll back to 270.61 to get my issues to stop. My cards were causing a blue screen from Bad Company 2 until I rolled back the driver. I also set up a fan profile in EVGA Precision to rule out heat as an issue. This may or may not be your problem but it is always the easiest first step since drivers tend to cause all kinds of weird issues.

 

[mkl]

I play on 100% fan cycle (RivaTuner) - doesn't seem to be a heat issue (FurMark would probably rule that out, as well). Will try a quick test with older drivers (as GT 520 ran with the same driver set) - will report back after. Thanks!

 

[mkl]

Using old drivers didn't seem to help... any other ideas?

 

[mkl]

Update:

Got a picture from one of the errors. Sometimes games cause my screen to flash random pixels that change places and colour rapidly. Rebooting my computer fixes this.

Picture: http://imageshack.us/f/5/fuuuur.png/

Any ideas?