Slightly similar to the Mafia question:

Given a P4 with a Radeon 9800 Pro, that sometimes freezes completely, sound looping, and sometimes the graphics turn off (go black) while the computer keeps working for a while "in the background" - what is likely to be wrong?

I was thinking the graphics card might be overheating for the blank screen issue. It typically happens either on the boot screen or when playing a graphics intensive game, not when just surfing the net.

I saw the other hang, completely frozen with sound looping, in Halo the other day.

Would drivers be a likely problem? (see Mafia question)

Are there any generic tools for monitoring the chip temperature of a Radeon, or do they lack a heat sensor?

I had similar problems with almost any newer gaming title I played.

My system specs were:
Barton 2500+ OC'd @ 2Ghz
1gig D-DDR
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro.
SB Live! 5.1
2000 & XP Pro.

I tried alot of different things to resolve the problem, but in the end what seemed to fix everything was replacing my SB Live! 5.1 with an Audigy 2 ZS and moving it to a new PCI slot. Since then I haven't locked up once playing a game.

Is any over clocking going on? I have had similar affects when I was over clocking my processor all to hell. But it was the hard drive that was actually giving out (when you overclock a p4 you have to do it with the bus, so it jacks up the speed of everything else in the system, and if one part can't keep up it dies... I was just mentioning this to those who are not familiar with the intel locked cpu ratio).

I had a similar problem to what you are describing Adron while playing graphic intense games. For me, it ended up being that the graphics card was overheating. Upon opening the case up, a large gathering of dust had settled onto all parts of the card. A quick round with the vacuum and I haven't had a problem since.

Hopefully this helps you!

I have been running into the same kinds of issues since upgrading to Windows Server, with my P4 / Radeon 9700. Sometimes it hangs, with looping sound and then starts up again after about 10 seconds (most frequent). Sometimes I get a BSoD with a device failure. Can't say I get a black screen.

Whenever my monitor would go *black* (Not into power saving, but pure black) and the computer would keep running in the background it would happen because I adjusted my hardware acceleration. :/