For me, the bell ringing is constant, and it has nothing to do with my old boxing or football 'carreers', nor even Silent Hunter - it just goes with the territory...
I'm almost certain though that I made changes in the nVidia control panel, like JuanLiquid did. You get to that DPI setting thingie by right-clicking on your SH3.exe file in the game's root folder, choose "Properties" with a left-click in that 'context' menu, then click on the "Compatibility" tab. The middle section has "Disable visual themes" and "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings". There's also the "Run this program as an administrator" in the section below. If you choose the 'administrator', you'll have to answer the UAC prompt "Are you sure...??" everytime you start the game, but for my computer, SH3 does not run correctly without doing that, and also setting the "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" at the top of that tab page for something Win7 or earlier, if I'm using the Win8 or 10 machines.
My SH4 is the game that I had pixelation issues in before, along with strange reflections, and that was just after I got the GTX560Ti and was using their "default..." settings for the driver. I never did have trouble with my older nVidia 4450, nor my ATI cards...
