I've seen this before with a power supply that is not large enough, and with a system that is not sufficiently cooled. You might want to check these two factors...

The system is water cooled and gets nice low temps, the ambient case temp is low as well(with my two 90mm blowholes and a 120 I would hope its low). My other computer is also running a radeon 8500 and it has higher temps across the board with no problems. I think I might go get a temp probe from radio shack or something and see what the video card is truly at, and no Im not overclocking 2.4 is enough for now and the radeon 8500 can hold its own. I guess if it is a problem with heat on the video card I could get a gpu water block or a crystal orb.
 
oops almost forgot the power supply is 500watts and the voltages are quite stable so I doubt it the PS.

It may seem stupid, but just check the refresh rate on your monitor and on the game settings. Sometimes it's stupid stuff like that which can get ya.

Thanks for all the help guys Ill try some new drivers and might reinstall direct x and each of the games and see if those help, tell you how it went as soon as i can.

I got a similar problem when chosing the high performance defaults in my bios setup. Afterwards any dx8.1 app would crash after short time. But the dxdiag tool showed no error. With the factory defaults everything runs fine now....
 
Sheppi

Thanks, Ill try that too soon as I have time school is always worst the first few weeks, then the teachers realise they have half of the quarter done way too fast and have to slow down. Ill get back to you guys after I try it.