update. still crashing. bought some new games. The Witcher doesn't even make it through the opening scene (the 3d scene, not the video). Had artifacting instantly. Updated drivers multiple times. Got rid of nTune because I think it is too old for my GPU's and crashes all the time. This week I think I will try to RMA the videocards because this is rediculous. A computer of this magnitude shouldn't have these problems. Its basically useless.
Older games like Halo 2 and the original Ghost Recon wont work either. Halo 2 wont do anything. Ghost Recon crashes in the openning 3d scene like the witcher. artifacts off the bat.
The typical crash sequence is.....everything is fine for about 60 seconds, then it skips a frame or too, then it freezes for 20 seconds, jumps a couple more frames, freezes for a minute (if there is audio it keeps going through all this), then it either hard crashes and needs restarted or the OS officially says "the driver stopped responding" and tries to get it going again (sometimes does, takes about 5 minutes, but then game just continues to crash).
I've tried everything software-wise I know of and have learned about to try to stabilize this system. So i'm thinking it has to be hardware.
Its weird though...cuz every video card I've ever bought was either bad out of the box, or went bad in 6 months or so. Nvidia, ATI, good ole' Voodoo3 or whatever.