8knxp + 9500pro = long string of expletives.

Pull up the task manager and click on Performance, watch the CPU usage when this happens. Something may be running in the back ground taking up cpu cycles. Make sure you don't have virus protestion running and updating every 30 seconds or something like that. I saw this on a computer running Nortons that was trying to scan every 5 mintues.

Look for other programs that may be doing something of the like.

 

War, do you have any CD's in your Optical Drives?

I get a problem that is similar to that sometimes and it usually happens when my optical drives get stuck in a loop constantly trying to ID the disc that's in it. (I think one of my drives is bad, but I'm too lazy to figure out which one, and too poor to buy a new one )

Pop open the Optical Drives and just leave the trays out and see if it still does it.

If not, I'd suspect that one of yer opticals is bad. (Btw, I have the same Burner as you, and that's the one I suspect is dead in my setup. Burns CD's just fine, but has a hard time reading some of them.. hehe)

 

Have you emailed ATI about it? I doubt its an issue with drivers, but the times I've emailed them about an issue, they seemed to have some type of suggestiont try, even if they outright said they didn't think it was related to the video card.

I personaly do not have any experiance with Gigabyte boards since they had compaitibility issues with Geforce 3 cards. They wouldn't post, and sometimes hardware damage would occured to the video card.

You're power supply should be plenty good. Enermax is a decent supply. But upping the wattage never hurts. Your bios should have a hardware monitor that shows the voltage breakdown, and what the running values are over the lines are. If you have a variation of more then .5, you might think about replacing the psu anyhow.

I'd double check and make sure all your IDE bios/drivers and Intel chipset drivers (from either your mobo maker, or intel genuine) are up to date.

 

don't know if this would have anything to do with your problem but I've heard of people having problems with their video cards because the OS flagged them as sharing an irq with their soundblaster cards... try moving the sound blaster card all the way down to the last PCI slot on your motherboard and see if that helps any.

 

Upgrade your bios. Latest revision from that board apparently addresses issues with some AGP Graphics cards.

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showthread/t-57456-p-2.html

 

I used to have the same problem but it was my mouse settings that caused it. There was a box in my mouse settings that would stop mouse exceleration when a game was launched and I windowed it. I have a logitech mouse and the newest drivers, so if this any help I'm glad I could help.