I think, Shawn, you might be onto something -at least I hope you are.

I'm going to put me CSI cap on - please, bear with me, this might be relevant.

I've inherited this desktop from  a friend who used to live with us - when she moved back abroad last year, I got her home-bulit PC she used to play WoW on. Didn't think much about it, I had my lappy to play around. Last November my laptop died, and after having two motherboards replaced in the meantime, the general concensus was that not even a miracle of biblical proportions can help anymore.

So - after the New Year I shuffled to my spare room and fired the desktop. It looked immaculate, clean, tidy, had big fans that made you shiver with cold, just the kind I needed after the overheating fiasco my laptop put me through.

Until recently I've been slowly adding stuff to it, my software, rescued files from the laptop (I've even managed to find in the loft an ancent copy of Carrara from  a 3D mag.) I tried it all on the machine, it worked - slow, but it worked, and the temperatures were reasonable - 33 C when idling in Firefox and low - mid sixites when under full load during multi-hour render. However , the on-board graphics card that came with the motherboard was beyond pathetic - when I ran Cinebench, the result was  beyond bad - it was of the "Are you kidding me?!" kind.

By now I had downloadeed Vue PLE - and fell hopelessly in love (imagine - all them nice things I had for Daz, with Vue light, Vue enviroment creation, Vue rendering capabilities :mistyeyed:) After doing a few test renders of different sizes with just a sea plane and an atmosphere (during which temps climbed instantly to mid-sixties), I've braved myself enough to play with some freebie scenes found here at Renderosity and sharecg. The PC started struggling, churned out two lovely cinemascope pics of a respectable size. And then the first shut down happened. Thinking that my graphics drivers need updating (the computer was not in use for quite some time), I've taken care of that. Didn't help - the card's performance was unchanged and the shutdowns continued. Thinking that my poxy graphics was to blame, I've put a lovely Nvidia I had still in its box, new and unopened, that was bought a while back for my old desktop (now deceased) and never installed. I've updated its drivers to the latest version and ran the Cinebench test - awesome. Played like a song. However, I noticed all of the temps were now about 5 - 6 C higher. Of course this muppet (me) got a bit concerned but I was too extatic about the improved graphics to pay due attention - Open GL 3.3, Open CL, CUDA thingy, its own fan - what could possibly go wrong?

Then I fired up Vue - and then the hell broke loose.

I have two hard drives, one with XP and one with Windows 7 - I tried Vue from both (naturally the installed PLE version  on each drive matched the requirements of the respective OS) -  there was no difference. Dead the moment you get to the moment you start rendering. In fact, the shutdowns must have affected the drive with Windows 7 - now it won't even start - it just hangs on welcome screen and goes nowhere.

I've checked the suggested options in Vue display options menu, I've clean uninstalled/reinstalled the program, cleared out the render stack, Appdata folder, unchecked the background drawing and anti-aliasing - no joy. Nothing worked.

Last night, out of sheer desperation, I took the GPU out and went back to the pathetic onboard graphics. Vue came out of its corner, whimpered a bit, but it rendered a simple sea/atmo 300x200 render. It was teeth-pulling slow, it struggled, it was worryingly hot (all four cores chugging at mid sixities almost continuously) but it didn't cut the power to the computer. At this stage I dare not see if it could cope with the proper-sized render - shutdowns can't be doing much good to the hard drives.

Shawn, you have mentioned my weak PSU . I had a think.

The integrated card used less power, it is borderline useless, computer ran cooler.

New GPU has its own fan, performed admirably otherwise but needed more juice, computer ran hotter and the moment Vue demanded all of the power - everything shut down.

My power supply - 350W.

Are we onto something here? :hopeful look in my eyes:

I have no idea if this will help unravel the Vue/my computer mystery, my technical knowledge doesn't extend past the changing of the light-bulb stage. I've tried a few other posh programs in the past - C4D, Max, Lightwave, and they all sent me running for the hills screaming the moment I saw their interface. Vue is more intuitive, friendlier, and it does awesome stuff - I'm desperate to have it working. I know iI have only a personal learning edition, but I cannot commit myself even to buy Frontier until I am sure it will work - if my old Phenom quad-core is not up to it, then I'll have to start saving for the new machine first before I get anywhere near Vue...