I recently built a new computer with a 1GB NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT graphics card and installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit on it. I formatted the hard drive and did a clean install of everything. I am not overclocking any of the components, and I have checked the GPU temps and ran stress tests, and the GPU doesn't get very hot, maybe around 50C.
Every time I try to game on it, even with a game as simple as Portal, the game will freeze up and the graphics driver will crash. The screen will flash black for a second, and the monitor will stop recieving a signal from the graphics card temporarily. After 2 or 3 seconds, the system starts working properly again. This is the error it's giving me: "Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version xxx.xx stopped responding and has successfully recovered."
I have tried this using the default drivers that came with the card, the most up to date drivers on NVIDIA's website, and an older version of the drivers from NVIDIA's website. No matter what driver version I have installed, this still happens. It has even happened before when I wasn't even running a game, just using Firefox.
I have checked Windows Update for any updates, uninstalled the drivers and used Driver Sweeper to fully remove them before installing a new version, and no matter what I cannot seem to fix the error. Any suggestions?
The rest of my specs:
Diablotek 450-watt PSU
ASROCK P43DE Motherboard
2 GB DDR2 667 MHz
2.8 GHz Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading
(yes, I know the CPU and RAM aren't great, I'm upgrading both as soon as I can, but it still should be enough to run a game like Portal, and I don't think it is related to the cause of this error)