Freeze & lag while playing

Adding my voice to the growing chorus of game crashing.
My system:
Inetrnet speed is 20Mbps
Alienware X51 R2
64 bit Windows 7 Premium Edition
Intel i7-4770 CPU @3.40GHz
16GB RAM
2TB Seagate Hard Drive
NVIDIA GE FORCE GTX 760 Ti OEM
It is one year old and still under warranty

My story:
I view three COH2 forums many times each day although I rarely post anything myself.I love this game and have been playing for well over a year, with 1595 hours logged onto COH2 and I have purchased all of the available DLC. I spent nearly half my life in the US Navy and retired from active duty some 16 years ago. I am now old and phat and have some disability issues that keep me from playing multiple player games. COH2 has become good "therapy" for me and it is the only game I play.

Long story short, my system started crashing about 4-5 weeks ago. At first it happened once every 4 or 5 games. But 3 weeks ago it started crashing on every game.My computer cost nearly $2,000 and
should not be crashing.Before each crash my fans would go to warp speed then comes the crash.I have been in constant contact with Dell-Alienware technical support since then and they have been fantastic. Probably 10+ hours on the phone with them, as recent as 2 days ago. Initially they blamed my video card and they sent me a new one. Game still crashed. Then they thought windows corrupted... remove and fresh install. Still crashing.Two days ago they thought it best to wipe my PC clean and restore it to the factory settings. I did not restore anything from my back-up, so in a sense I was using a new computer. After re-downloading this game and trying it multiple times today... it crashed within 2 minutes of each game start. I must admit that I was able to finish a game a few days ago, but I can only play about 10-15 seconds and when I hear the fans going to warp, then I must control-alt-delete and open task manager, then walk away for 3-5 minutes and let the system slow down and cool down. Then I am able to again play for 10-15 seconds more. My 1 hour game took me 7 hours to complete.

The one consistency in all of this is that on all three of the COH2 forums that I follow... there are multiple people on each forum with nearly identical complaints. Each of us who are in this dilemma seem to have different components, so this is not a RAM issue or a NVIDIA issue or an AMD issue, etc... The only thing we all have in common is that we are all trying to play a game that we enjoy. The only common thread as I see it is Relic itself. Am I wrong?

Just how many people are going to quit this game before Relic finally does something?

...then walk away for 3-5 minutes and let the system slow down and cool down...

This might be your problem.

I remember the X51 being prone to overheating btw., you should check that out. Doubt it's a COH2 problem in this case.

For the most part there is nothing you can do for this issue. It happens to people with mediocre PC's and with beastly PC's. Its just poor optimization.

I would be suprised if this has to do with internet connections. I have a low end laptop and the shittiest internet you can imagine. Playing coh2 on lowest settings works fine with fps between 30 and 50 (1v1 and 2v2).

During the game I sometimes have very short lag spikes. The game freezes for a half of a second and after that its fine again. It happens 2 or 3 times in a match.

These are my internet specs:

I have the same issue since today, after steam update.
I played well for entire year without lags. Any ideas?

I bought a i7 2600 and 16 gb ram with gtx 680. I dont have freezes anymore lol

I think it depends on the connection to the host...
sometimes I have freezes sometimes it runs quite well

Relic should work on their servers if coh2 will be part of esport soon tm

Its poor optimization.