Locking up in some games

[almostgfx]

Hey guys so its my week off work and my pc has started playing up. This has only started this week from about Sunday.. What happens is when im playing (Certain) games after any random amount of time the pc will lock up and either have to try and task manager it off where i see the message "AMD driver has stopped responding but has recovered" or will crash my whole pc and i will have to force a restart. To me it seems really odd its only just acting up now.
No new hardware has been installed and its not dusty or overheating.

Anyway heres a list of what i have tried so far.

Clean the whole card with compressed air and checked connections and cables to the psu.

Checked the pc make sure its not being blocked or not sending enough power.

Removed the whole amd drivers and ran a driver and registry cleaner/fix.

Windows mrfix it thing..

Underclocked the GPU to see if that helps.

Ive checked the temps of my GPU when it crashes and when comes back on. 50 idle. 68 under load. CPU 27-34

Thats all i can think of at the moment. Games it doesn't seem to like at the moment are Darksiders 2 (but i thought it was just down to bad port) and just recently borderlands 2. Its been fine with these games for ages no problems at all and just as i have a week off bam. Problem time.
Ive played games like bf3,css,l4d,cod,tf2 etc etc and they all work fine.

If anyone has any suggestions for things i havnt tried yet or know anything about this orrr even if its the games fault and not my hardware id love to know as its getting a little irritating now.

Anyway im writing this pretty late so i apologise for bad grammar or anything and i look forward to any responses to anyone who can help.

 

[almostgfx]

GPU clock and memory clock.

All voltages and stuff havnt been messed with they are all default and been working fine since June when the card was purchased. PSU is a corsair AX750 rest of my spec are in signature.

I have 12.8 from the website as i thought this was the latest release or so it tells me

 

[almostgfx]

i'll give it a go and see what happens.
It just lagged out my desktop pretty bad and crashed out so ugh ill sleep on it and give it a test in the morning and possibly swap the GPU out to test aswell.
Thanks for the help so far.


So i tried it but doesn't seem to really do anything much. However when the game is loading i can hear what i think is a slight coil whine coming from the
gpu when the game is loading up until the point of actually spawning into the game but only seems to be doing it with certain games again.
Seems like any game that would require a little more power than something like a source game is seeming to be a problem. Still under its website warranty since
it was only purchased on "Tue 19th Jun 2012" so think it should get RMA'd?

 

[almostgfx]

Just tried to play something easy (Team fortress 2 ) and it dropped in frames like crazy and now im on the desktop it seems a little laggy im gonna try swap it out with my spare 5770 and see what happens.
I already sent an e-note the the website where it was purchased asking if they think i should rma it

 

[almostgfx]

Corsair AX750.

The 5770 is in just gonna run some tests once the drivers are on

Desktop seemed to be smoother, browsing through album covers on itunes seemed flawless. The 7970 lagged when it was doing this.
Borderlands 2 on the same settings seems to be running better on the 5770 than it did on the 7970. No coil whine from it and no frame
drops or random pauses..

Continue teting..

---------

Darksiders 2 running perfect no crashes. It seems to be out performing everything that the 7970 did..
I guess its time to RMA it

 

[almostgfx]

So after all the testing and suggestions you guys given me ( thank you for the help) I decided to rma the item back which was no delivery charge to me and today it has been found at fault and a replacement will be with me Wednesday hope this just doesn't happen again and again thanks for all the suggestions before I sent it away