Looking for some help

[Snowreap]

it sounds very much like you either have a video card overheating problem, or you have a marginal power supply that's not able to keep your system powered when your GPU starts to draw a lot of power. in many cases a power supply issue would cause your whole system to shut down, but if you have a multi-rail power supply and only the GPU rail is having problems, then your system might keep running.

heat seems the more likely culprit. a high-end graphics card won't be able to actually run at higher settings if you can't keep it cool. for some users with extreme performance demands this means removing the stock heatsink/fans and replacing them with liquid-cooling systems. for more mainstream users, this means making sure that the GPU fans are running and the cooling fins aren't clogged with dirt.

-ken