Hi, I'm getting very annoying crashes after upgrading. The strange thing is that it only happens when I play BF3, but not in other demanding games like Crysis 3. When I first upgraded, BF3 would either crash in game or briefly after exiting with a Windows 8 blue screen: A critical process has died. A few months later and after a lot of software updates, the crashes still occur, but instead of a blue screen, I get massive audio stuttering for a few seconds (probably from the audio mixer dying), followed by no audio at all, no fancy themed Windows (probably the desktop compositor dying), and inability to close & start programs. The occurrence of these crashes is about ever few hours.

I've run MemTest+ and Prime 95 torture test (using 12GiB RAM) overnight and neither show a problem.

I've kept almost all my previous hardware and only upgraded the processor and motherboard (Core I5 750, Gigabyte HM57 --> Core I7 4770, Maximus VI). I also have the latest BIOS, GTX 680 and Realtek audio drivers.

Has anyone else experienced this or can suggest how to fix it? Do you think this is a hardware problem, a software problem, or an unfortunate combination?

Thanks for helping