Battlefield 3 freezes 5 minutes into the campaign

This is basically "how do I determine if my hardware is stable?"

Try

• run Prime95 overnight and see if your CPU is stable

• run Memtest86 overnight and see if your memory is stable

• run Furmark for an hour or so (be careful as this thing loads GPUs far beyond any realistic load)

Warning: Battlefield 3 is known to be extremely GPU intensive and may cause more heat than most games.

edit: apparently there might be a possible RealTek sound driver conflict, too. Apparently there's a history of Realtek issues with DICE engine games, so this is not new. A lot of people are saying "use USB audio" as a workaround. Can you try that?

This is a very common issue. On the official EA forums (via http://battlelog.battlefield.com), there is a technical support thread with over 500 people reporting the same issue (myself included).

Not to dampen your spirits of getting it fixed, but I reformatted my PC, and the problem remained.

Having contacted EA support, their suggestions were as follows;

• Try updating Punkbuster manually (download from http://evenbalance.com)
• Try opening the required ports for Battlefield 3, and try disabling all software (e.g. Windows, AV) and hardware (e.g. router) firewalls.
• Try closing down all other running applications to eliminate an application conflict.

All of these suggestions screamed "Generic troubleshooting attempts", not specifically directed towards the problem.

As mentioned by Jeff, a lot of people have resolved the problem through playing with their sound drivers;

• Disable any sound devices in Device Manager you dont use
• If you have any Realtek sound drivers installed, try uninstalling them so the Windows driver is used instead.
• Try disabling your sound hardware in your BIOS

(Obviously, playing without sound is a bit of a b$%^£.)

But there are still a huge percentage of people who cannot resolve the issue.

I had the exact same problem. In the menu, I could stay for 10 minutes and nothing bad happened. When I played the campagin, I had a black screen after a few minutes of gameplay for an unknown reason.

I have a Geforce GTX 560 Ti OC version (but You said You have a laptop, still I hope You have the same issue with the different gpu).

I fixed it by upgrading the bios of the graphics card. The problem disappeared and I am playing BF3 happily for hours straight without any issues.