Playing games on the Intel HD 4000 iGPU crashes my PC?

I'm wanting to just play games on low settings until I can order my dedicated GPU, but everytime I try to play BF1942, BF3, or the new MoH, my PC almost instantly crashes.  I've tried maxing the dedicated RAM for the iGPU to 1GB, but that didn't do anything. Set everything to stock. 16GB of RAM passed Memtest no problem. Latest Intel drivers installed.

Relevant Specs:

i5 3570K (Stock clocks, Stock cooler)

Sabertooth Z77 (Latest BIOS & drivers)

16GB TeamXtreem 1600MHz

AX850 PSU

Everything else runs great, my temps are reasonable. But as soon as I fullscreen to load a game, everything just freezes and is completely unresponsive.  Any help is appreciated guys, thanks!

A little more info, I swapped in a dedicated GPU (GT430 1GB) from another pc I have access to, just to see what would happen.  BF3 loaded and ran perfectly.  So I'm assuming this means it is specifically something wrong with the Intel HD 4000.  I suppose I could pick up a cheap card for the time being, but I would rather just use the integrated and save that money for the 670 or 680 that I want...

Quote:

Originally Posted by grivy 

You could try running Furmark to test for stability of the IGP.

This.  Will run Furmark (albeit slowly) in windowed mode, but as soon as I go to fullscreen it locks up.  Anyone have a link to a guide to how to setup the iGPU for stability/overclocking?

Quote:

Originally Posted by grivy 

To get the IGP stable I would normally say you can either lower the multiplier of the IGP, increase the voltage (the IGP has the same voltage constraint as the rest of the CPU so 1.52V) or try increasing the IGP maximum current capability. Test 30 mins of Furmark for stability.
But I do not think IGP stability is the problem for 2 reasons. One when my IGP crashes the program/game quits, aero is down for a sec, but since the load has been taken off the IGP immediately recovers. And two, because the IGP can easily be overclocked up to about 100% by changing only the multiplier. So having an instable IGP due to an frequency issue on stock seems odd to me. However do note that by default it's on offset voltage, so not constant.
What I would suggest is to first check whether it is not an issue with your ram, so try 1333 and see what changes.

It looks like it's most likely either a driver or a RAM issue after all. After resetting the BIOS to default, and then only changing the iGPU to have 1GB of VRAM, I could run MoH and BF3 fullscreen, but I would get DX10 or DX11 errors when the game used up all of that VRAM. It's no biggie, I only have to wait a couple of weeks to order my 670, so I'll survive until then.  Lots of good info about overclocking the iGPU though, thanks!

Quote:

Originally Posted by grivy 

Thanks, sadly that info is barely available on the web, one last small thing though, the performance of the IGP also scales almost linearly with the frequency..
I play all my games on 720p (limited by my tv..) and I can only allocate 512MB of VRAM, yet it hasn't crashed on me like yours is. If I recall correctly the amount of required VRAM depends largely on the resolution so I'd suggest that you try 720p.

I'm using my 32" Toshiba 720p LCD and outputting to it in that resolution. I imagine other games would play just fine, it's just that MoH and BF3 use lots of Vram