Source of the Problem??

Okay so I seem to have this problem with every single PC game I try to play. Basically I'm just trying to focus on possible causes of the problem. When I start a game up, let's say Age Of Empires III, as soon as the intro video comes up I hear some weird clicking or ticking. Then I can play as usual but with the clicking popping up every once in a while.. Then usually after a random amount of time the game will freeze. OR I can actually quit the game and do somethin else for a while but somewhere down the road - my PC freezes.

This happens with every game, more often with more taxing games on my video card. Now I know clicking is usually associated with HDDs but I just dunno about that. I have two HDDs and for example. I had Pirates installed on HDD 1 and had the problem so I wiped the drives clean and installed WinXP and Pirates on the other drive and had the same problem.


1GB Corsair
Barton 3200
9800 Pro Omega Drivers
120GB + 80GB HDDs
MSI K8-n72 delta-l mobo

just possible areas of concern would be great...

is your pc oc'd? i had this happen too.

one time it was due to low vcore, second time my temps were too high and thus the freeze.

is your v/c clocked really high? is this happening when temps are their highest(around noon)?