Mac Pro Crashing Grrrrr.... ANY ADVICE???

[GotPro]

Hey Guys.

I've got the Mac Pro Quad 2.8 + nVidia 8800GT.

Here's my config:

4 Drives (Hitachi 1TB bay one, WD 500 bay two, WD 400 bay three, WD 320 Bay four).

Stock 2GB Ram.

I'd added 2 1GB sticks from Transintl, but took them out as the Mac would intermittently crash hard with the funky grey screen telling me I needed to restart my Mac.

Thought it was bad Ram from Trans Intl... because I couldn't even get through a clean install of the OS with the Ram in there without the thing crashing.

So, took out the third party ram, and re-formatted on the Hitachi 1TB drive ... and re-installed the OS Clean and all was well.

Loaded XP for gaming via Bootcamp on one of the other drives, loaded VMWARE, WOW, and SIMS2.

Haven't had ANY time to actually play for a long time (other than 30 seconds or so to test things out).

ANYWAY...

I go to work today, and my Fiance' is at the house playing the SIMS2 (in OSX)...

Every 10 minutes of gaming time... the system crashes... not the app... the SYSTEM... and she has to shut down / restart.

WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?

I've only done the following:

Clean install
iLife '08
iWork
VMWARE (no actual virtual machines yet)
Copied over itunes / iphoto files from backup
Installed WOW
Installed Sims 2
Installed Sims 2 Pets
Applied all updates
Installed XBENCH, ONYX, and VLC.

THATS IT.

Where should I check???? What do you think the heck is going on?????


(P.S. The game resolution is 1680x1050 with most settings on medium).

 

[killmoms]

My money would be on graphics card overheating. Not that you'll get a lot of help from Apple with that—if they can't make it fail using utilities that come on the system, they pretty much refuse to do anything. That's why I ended up selling my previous-gen Mac Pro (with an X1900XT), because Apple refused to replace the card as they couldn't replicate my issues.

 

[GotPro]

is there an app that will let me increase the fan speed of the new 8800GT?

Update:

I walked her through downloading and installing FanControlSMC 2.1.2...

We've turned ALL THE SYSTEM FANS on about 1/2 way fast... sounds like a jet engine apparently

She's going to try and get it to lock up. This will be VERY interesting if this is the case.

If it's overheating... do you think this is an Apple Issue that they would / should fix?

If it's NOT overheating... do you think it could be a logic board / video card issue?