The Sims 2 crashing on HD 2600XT HELP!!!?

Question

Ok I have a Gateway GT5670 with Vista Home Premium, 3 Gigs of ram, AMD Phenom 2.1GHz 3 core, and a HIS IceQ Turbo HD 2600 XT GFX card (512MB pci-e 16x)

I can start The Sims 2 it loads, gets to the neighborhood selection menu, click on one, it loads that, and then within ~1-2 seconds mouse pointer freezes, screen goes to garbage then black, it comes back to the blank blue loading screen (like when you alt-tab out of the game and back in) and repeats the process. I am able to get out of the game with alt-tab and kill it with task manager after which I get a few pop ups about the VPU recover saying your GFX driver has stopped responding and has been recovered. This card has run every other 3D game I have perfect (Half Life2 Episode2, Oblivion, NFS Pro Street, etc.) and still does.

All drivers are up to date, No heat problems, GFX card not even a month old.

... Im lost.

Answer 1

When you say all drivers are up to date, are you running 8.8 CCC?  I have read about many HIS customers having problems out of HIS and the updated drivers.  See the card you got and many cards HIS sells are overclocked models and are tested with the CD drivers only, not the new updated drivers off the ATI website.  Go back to your old previous drivers.  Also I have had cards before that worked flawlessly without Catalyst Control Center.  With CCC the card would crash and act freaky.  Just using the same model # display driver only and the graphics card.  Just some info, hope you the best of luck...