Hi everyone, I hope someone can help! I have just built a complete new system based around a Biostar TA790GX mobo and x7750 cpu. All parts are new. I have been building & repairing & upgrading pc's and working in the IT world for 15 years so this is not my first build, however I do not profess to know everything and I have been working with computers long enough to know that inexplicable variables do crop up every now and then! Any help or advice is appreciated. Biostar TA790GX motherboard AMD x2 7750 BE cpu 2 x 2gb OCZ gold 5-5-5-18 800mhz Silverstone Scala 13e case Powercool 80+ 650w SLi power supply Powercolor HD 4650 XBOX 360 Controller New HTPC build, everything went together fine, installed Vista fine. Although this is to be a HTPC I decided to load Crysis on just to benchmark the machine. Playing Crysis on medium settings everything started fine then after about 5 mins in the game paused and went to the pause menu. Thinking it was something I pressed I resumed the game. A couple of minutes later it paused again. I put on task manager to monitor CPU usage and continued again. A couple of minutes later it paused again. I checked the CPU useage and it showed that it had been running along at anout 40%, then a slight spike up to 60% then a drop to literally 0%. I dont know whether the CPU stopped causing the game to pause or whether the CPU activity at 0% is because the game was paused?I loaded on 3d Mark 06 just to load the graphics card and cpu and see if this application pauses but I ran this numerous times times and with teh cpu under load it did not seem to pause or stall. My first thought that was that it is probably the graphics card so I installed the latest drivers and flashed the motherboard bios just to ensure that everything was up to date. I resumed Crysis and after a couple of minutes of playing it paused and did the same again. (I have to add it seems to be at random times and not when there is any specificly graphically intensive action going on screen). Just to make sure that it wasnt the graphics card I uninstalled the drivers and installed my old 8800 gts 640mb and the latest drivers to compare. It did exactly the same thing. I then thought maybe there was an issue with power supply, so I swapped it with the 750w supply from my other machine. Exactly the same thing happened. I then swapped out the memory with the 667mhz memory on my old machine and that also made no difference. I thought that I should try an XP install just to compare and a clean install with only the latest system drivers and Crysis game and patch did exactly the same thing. The only things that I have not been able to swap out to compare are the case (could there maybe be an earthing issue?), and the hard drive (all of my other drives are ide and not sata - could a hard drive be responsible for this kind of behaviour? I only had a few games about but decided to load a few games on and see if it was just Crysis, so I loaded on Outrun and Wipeout, and guess what - they paused as well!! The only other thing that I have not done is taken the paddle board that goes in the 2nd crossfire slot out whilst the 4650 is in the master slot. It says that the paddle board is required to be in the 2nd slot in order for the PCIe slot to run at 16x, without it it will only run at 8x. All tests were done with the paddle board in. I have sent the motherboard back to be checked so I cant test without the paddle connector, however they say that they have tested the motherboard on their test bench, loaded Crysis and played it for over an hour and the game did not pause.... and they have found no fault. Anybody have the same problem? Any thoughts?? Thanks for taking the time to read this!