I'm hoping that someone might be able to help/advise me on how to resolve an issue that I am currently experiencing.
About two years ago I built my current system, and at that time everything seemed OK, however I was busy and never had time to do any real gaming. The last few months I have gotten into Skyrim, Civ 5, and a few other game, mostly because my kids are starting to get into them and I want to know what they are playing (I enjoy it as well). But here is the problem: I am getting frozen screens, complete black outs, sometimes even getting kicked right out of the game. For different games the syptoms are slightly different, but all appear to be graphics related.
I've spoken with friends and they are suggesting that the issue is my graphics card (EVGA GEFORCE GTX 660), but as far as I know this card should handle these games easily. I have downloaded and installed the latest drivers for both the card, and the monitor and still no resolution.
The various symptoms per game are:
Besiege: Screen freezes, and sometime goes black, but usually restores itself and game play can continue.
Skyrim: Will freeze, often. Need to Ctrl-Alt-Del and then select goto "Skyrim" to continue. This works until I get completely kicked out. Need to save continuously, just to be safe! I've tried reduced screen sizes, lower detail settings and windowed mode. Still the same.
Civilization V:
Playing in Directx 10/11, looks great, until everything freezes and the screen goes grey.Doing Ctrl-Alt-Del sometime helps, and occasionally there is a windows dialog popup saying: "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered. Display driver NVIDIA Kernal Mode Driver Version 347.52 stopped responding and has successfully recovered." Other times a Render Error dialog appears and says: "FGXRenderer11::Present failed hr=DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED. Driver failure" and clicking OK to this closes Civ 5 completely.
Playing it in DirectX 9 and in window mode I don't get to see the great graphics, but at least when I have to Ctr-Alt-Del, I am able to continue. Its just sometimes this happens so frequently (a few seconds apart) that its hard to get ahead in the game.
Now all three games are played via Steam, so I don't know if that might have something to do with it. I don't play enough other games to make a fair comparison.
My system specification is:
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP 1 (Build 7601) DirectX 11.0
CPU: Intel Core i&-4770K @ 3.50GHz
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i
RAM: 32 GB - 4 x 8GB PC#-12800H (800MHz) Patriot Memory 1866 CL10 Series
Display Adpator: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660
Monitor: HP w2007
PSU: Corsair AX1200i
MB: Sabertooth Z87
Any and all help is appreciated.
Much thanks, Fred.