That's an OpenGL card, isn't it? Do you have problems with other games that only use DirectX? Did you try running DXDiag to see if it can find any problems?

Also, I know you have a monster machine, but you could try turning off multisampling and other video options to see if running without those stops the rebooting.  Make sure that the GPU throttling is ON though.

It sounds like your machine should be running this game fine. I do notice that you have the same sound card I did. Any chance you can disable the SB and enable your on board sound (if you have it). Just to eliminate it as a cause?

CariElf - Yes it's an OpenGL, what's a good word, an OpenGL Optimized Card, but it still has all the full DirectX functionality as the X800 XTPE. I've never had DirectX problems with games, and i've run them all with 6x FSAA, 16x Anisotropic Filtering with fill triliniar filtering, etc... etc... DXDiag showed no problems. I tried turning FSAA and everything else off a while back, no difference. I even Used ATi Tray Tools To overide the games video options, nada.

jakanc - i guess i could try it, but, i dunno, i usually have a good gut instinct about these things, and i just don't think that's it, but i WILL try it and see what happens.

I just played for about an hour with no crashes... But that doesn't really mean the problem is gone, like i said, it's truely random...

LogicSequence, I was referring specifically to the Performance Options on the Options screen. Try turning them all on. If you stop having the reboots, then you can start turning them on one at a time to see if we can isolate what is causing the problem.

The Cr@ppy thing is it's an unreproduceable problem. It's not like i can load an autosave and have the game crash at the same point. ;(

CariElf - Okay, will try

Let us know your results. This is a very interesting random problem.

Sounds like a power supply issue to me. Random reboots are usually power or ram related...

If you want to test out your ram, download and run this happy program;
Stress Prime 2004
http://sp2004.fre3.com/download.htm
screen shots over here;
http://sp2004.fre3.com/screenshots.htm

If you have 2 cpus, install the program in 2 different folders and run one instance of each.
You can select CPU affinity in the program, uncheck 'no affinity' then set the box to CPU 1 and in the other instance to CPU 2. In the 'test' box select "Large, in place FFT's - stress ram'
Then hit the start button on each of them. If it can go a couple hours without crashing its not your ram. If it does crash, reduce your ram timings.

I bet its your power supply though...

i have an Enermax 660watt PSU, i seriously doubt that's the problem

CariElf - I just had a crash with all the options turned off. there's something in the game that is seriously tripping or something, it's really weird.

Did you also turn off anti-aliasing?

Driver Name: ati2dvag.dll Driver Version: 6.14.0010.6561

6561 is the 5.8 catalyst drivers which were released late summer 2005 if memory serves. Current drivers are 6.3 catalyst, so could be one possibility for a cause. Not outside the realms of possibility that one version of drivers causes something like this, nVidia 77.77s made DAoC crash like a bugger for me, rolled back a driver revision and problems vanished. Also notice you're in windowed mode, try fullscreen and see if that does anything?

Oh yeah, if it's crashing to reboot make sure you turn off automatic reboot in the System Properties -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery, then at least you'll get a BSOD which can give you an inkling of what the issue is. STOP messages can sometimes be helpful.

SmartException may be also useful

6561 is the 5.8 catalyst drivers which were released late summer 2005 if memory serves. Current drivers are 6.3 catalyst, so could be one possibility for a cause.

The trick is, he's using a FireGL card, not a Radeon card. The drivers for high-end professional/scientific cards like that tend to be rather older than the drivers for the mainstream cards. I just checked and ATI doesn't have any more current FireGL drivers. That may be the problem.

Setting the CPU affinity of the game after it starts to just one CPU might also help with stability.