Monitor turns off and pc/mouse/keyboard freeze

Hey, Ive googled the **** out of this and Ive tried everything I cant think of. My problem is:

While my cousin plays The Sims 2 the monitor would turn off and the amber light would turn on. Now I saw this happen twice while playing. But the next day I left the pc logged on in the Sims 2 main menu and it stayed on the whole night until she started to play the next morning. Now today I was playing CS and it happened. Ive done: Updated bios, installed latest video drives, system restore. Im thinking about reformatting. This seems to be a common problem according to google but the forum threads all leave a dead end with no answers. Also the monitor comes back on after a reboot.

(Googled: Monitor turns off pc freezes during game reboot fixes)

The pc has is: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229042

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400(3.0GHz)
4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800
500GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 7200RPM HDD
EVGA NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT 512MB PCI Express Video Card
Raidmax Sagitta II Case w/ 600W Power Supply

Chipset.......................NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI
Motherboard Name.......ASUS P5N-E SLI

OS: XP SP2 32bit

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Comments

RussS

How does it run otherwise?

Sounds to me like a power problem - or to be more correct a power problem caused by a capacitor discharge. I am going to take a stab at a motherboard cap, but could just be one on the graphics card if you are using an AGP one.

pLuhhmm

Here is what a other forum said. http://www.overclock.net/intel-general/429662-monitor-turns-off-pc-freezes-during.html#post5149656

Sounds like the problem.

msteinhilber

I would suggest trying an alternate video card as I would concur with the replies regarding the 9600GT possibly being faulty. I have a number of machines that were built using this card for playing back HD video and a good number of them would either perform the black screen you experience or just lock while preserving a freeze frame of the video output. Somewhere around 20% of the cards I would estimate had this issue, never really had issues with EVGA in the past but this time around our vendor offered BFG 9600GT's instead since many of these machines would be traveling far away from my location.

photex

Might also be an DirectX problem.
Had the simular problem while playing battlefield.
Updated DirectX.........fixed the problem!