Issues with games and monitor.

My computer setup is as follows:

Windows 7 ultimate
16 gb ddr3-1600
Asus Crosshair V Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black
OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB SSD
Seagate 1TB HD
2 Radeon 6870s
Antec 750 W power supply
Samsung 12x BD-ROM & DVD Burner Combo
2 23" LG flatron ips231p

OS is installed on the SSD.

My issues may have nothing to do with one another, but I thought I would check both in the same thread.

First: While playing both Skyrim and Batman: Arkham Asylum through steam, the games eventually slow down and begin to stutter. Eventually everything slows to a crawl and even after I close down the games, my whole system slowly freezes and I have to shut it down manually. This may not have anything to do with it, but I sometimes (once every few weeks) get BSODs as well, though not necessarily when playing those games. The freezing doesn't seem to happen when not playing games. The games are currently installed on my 1TB storage drive, but this happened when they were on the primary ssd as well.

Second: I can't get one of my monitors to leave power saving mode. When I plug it in as a secondary monitor, it turns on and has all kinds of artifacting around the outlines of anything on screen then gives the power saving mode message and turns off. When I plugged it in as the primary monitor, it turned on while windows booted, but it went into power saving mode before the windows login screen came up (the boot animation appeared normal). My computer only seems to have dvi-out, so I can't hook it up with vga.
One of my friends said I may have an issue with one of my graphics cards, but I am not savvy enough to know how to check such things.