Random crashes after upgrade to i7-870

[z0ttel]

Hi,

yesterday I've replaced my i3-540 CPU with an i7-870. After that, the game randomly suffers from 'crashes': the screen goes black but the game continues to run in the background. When hitting the Escape-key, the in-game menu is displayed, but if I go back to the game, the screen gets black again.
This occurs mainly when re-playing the Black Death track, what I've also seen is that loading the textures and displaying the environment at the beginning of the track now takes a lot of time.

With the i3-540 assembled, the game ran rock-stable without any crashes and also the texture loading times were much shorter.

Today I re-installed the whole OS and all the needed drivers; before doing this, I've deactivated the Hyperthreading functionality because I've read somewhere that this may cause problems if the program is not optimized in that way. Unfortunately, the described problems remain.

Game version is the latest Steam version. Before re-installing the OS, I've used the latest BETA patch which showed the same behaviour


Any ideas on that?