Games keep freezing.

Hey! I'm new to these forums and I was looking for some help. I posted this in the hardware forum cos to the best of my knowledge its seems like a hardware problem. I could be wrong though.

Specs

Nvidia 7600gt
Intel c2d e6400
1gb ram

and I honestly don't remember my other specs hahaha.

When I play my games, they freeze and there's a sound loop. During the freeze, towards the end of it, the sound loop tightens. Its pretty random freezing, and it seems to be more prone on some maps. Each freeze last anywhere between 5 seconds and around 30. Then the game continues... Then it freezes again... Then it continues... Then it freezes again sometimes back to back. Well you get the point... Makes playing games pretty frustrating.

Things I've tried:
Reinstalling games
Reinstalling Audio, video, and directx drivers
I've tested my RAM, and my hard drive
Virus scans
Fixing registry problems
Setting my games to only use one core instead of two (I guess the cores don't work in sync and that sometimes causes the same problem I have).

My gpu runs over 135 fahrenheit when I'm playing games, but I really don't know how hot too hot is.

Anyone have any ideas? I'm gonna try switching my gpu out with someone elses to see if that works, but I'm not thinking it will.

 

Is this something new or has it been like this forever? Is every game freezing or only some newer titles?

 

Ummm all the source games I've tried playing. And its a newly developed problem. Sometimes a little whiteblock appears on the bottom center of my screen while it freezes, but when it unlocks the block goes away. Sometimes textures and objects will be missing. Hope that helps.

 

Now that you mention a few rendering glitches, I start to suspect that your video card might be slowly going towards its end. No red flags here, but rendering glitches that have appeared apparently recently, are a thing to worry about. Do you have any friends with known working similar video cards? maybe you should pop one of their video cards in your rig and see what happens.

 

I'll try today and we'll see what happens then. I figured it was the end of my video card once I saw that little white box and the textures started missing. Oh well.