Freeze after updating catalyst drivers

[Spike]

For reference this is my main pc in my signature below. About 2 months ago I updated this pc to catalyst 12.6 (from 12.3) and immediately after that I had a game freeze and crash any time I played games which typically occurred 1-3 min into game play. I played around with my CPU OC, swapped power supplies and many other settings. Once I rolled back to a previous system restore the problem went away.

Yesterday I updated to catalyst 12.8 and the exact same problem happened, only this time my system restore points appear to not be working. I'm debating either doing a complete windows reinstall or reloading from a home server backup but I wanted to see what you guys thought first. What could my graphics drivers have done to cause this type of crash? Was there a significant change between 12.3 and the later releases? I tried reinstalled 12.3 but that did not fix the problem so something else changed.

Thanks!

 

[Elixer]

Try the normal debugging, run memtest86 overnight, and do occt or prime95 for a few hours. If those pass without error, then it could be a corrupted system file.
I also suppose it could be the video card as well, how are the temps ?

I would still do the memtest and prime95 tests before installing windows again, either fresh, or from a backup.

 

[Spike]

Try the normal debugging, run memtest86 overnight, and do occt or prime95 for a few hours. If those pass without error, then it could be a corrupted system file.
I also suppose it could be the video card as well, how are the temps ?

I would still do the memtest and prime95 tests before installing windows again, either fresh, or from a backup.

I ran memtest, intel burn test, and occt last time this occured and encountered no errors. What I did find was that I could crash the system by running ATI tool, sometimes almost immediately and sometimes it took a while. From everything I can tell the problem is related entirely to the GPU which could be software, power, or the GPU itself.

Temps were fine last I look but I do not actively monitor them. I've been getting into the upper 70's when I play stressful games (like BF3). Right now I'm idling at 63.