GTX560 Ti Twin Frozr micro stutter - Help needed please.

[CaNsA]

Specs:-
Win 7 Ent. x64
i7 930 D0 @ Stock
12Gb Geil DDR3
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (R2.0)
Crucial M4 128Gb SSD
2TB Barracuda 7200.12 2000DM001
1TB SpinPoint F2EG - 5400 (All games are installed on this)
OCZ ZT 750w
MSi N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II/OC 1GB @ Stock (nVidia 306.97 64bit)
Sony Bravia 32" LCD (over HDMI @ 1080)
Ample amounts of cooling, temps are not a concern in the slightest.

So there I am chilling out in Chernarus avoiding zombies and the like and quite often the screen will freeze, my FPS will drop from a 60-55 to single digits for a split second then rapidly climb back to 60-55fps.

I have logged the GPU stats in Afterburner and it shows that the GPU is max'd out for that split second.
Nothing else gets max'd out at all.

I do have to keep vsync enabled as tearing is a right ballache otherwise.
The stutter also occurs on previous versions of the driver, in Metro 2033 and all versions of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

I bought the card on the 28th Dec 2011, hopefully with the help of the OC "crew", I can find out if the card is faulty or not before the warranty runs out

Any help would be awesome.

Ta

 

[kissenger]

My guess would be that it's just Metro 2033 being Metro 2033. The game seems to require a GTX 690 just to get close to 60FPS stable. I'm sure I've seen benchmarks which had cards like the 580 and others drop into single digits at 'very high' settings. What settings are you using?

 

[CaNsA]

I have tested the settings dropped and it still happens, and not just with Metro 2033.

 

[logi-cat]

this might sound weird but i get the same thing happening to me as well with my msi 560ti hawk when playing mafia 2 and the way i solve the problem is disconnect the internet. Try that. it doesnt happen all the time but when it does thats what i do and its smooth as silk.