Aisuru - you can always just lug the entire ... omg, i havent had enough coffee yet... the entire... CPU unit to the computer store, get their opinion on type, etc... tell them you have to wait a little bit, and go home and order it online ;)

But i really DO recommend diagraming EVERYTHING.  I am nowhere near "tech-savvy" - I can pop in memory sticks, and anything that "just goes in a slot" - but when it comes to multiple wires coming out of a part like octopus tentacles... i get my trusty pencil & paper out!  I also write down things on scraps of paper (ok, bits I cut up just for this), and then tape them around wires on the part I'm replacing.  I had a power supply DIE one year, it had all the symptoms yours does - but it was doing the "power down" in Poser (I didn't have Vue - hadn't yet seen "the light" LOL).  After about 2 weeks of random shut downs, it died completely - on a government holiday (which shouldn't have mattered, but I was going through an agency for vocational training and they ended up purchasing my new power supply LOL).  When I picked up the part (two days later... stupid requesition forms... boy I was going through render withdrawals!) I ended up with something that looked like a metal box with a hole that had what appeared to be a fan in it, and a buncha wires coming out everywhere.

Looking inside my computer, I found a similar device... and went "oh crap."

Diagramed everything... and about 15 minutes after I finished the diagram (because I kept getting interrupted... not hard to do when at the time I was living in a house with 13 to 15 other people).... I had my new power supply installed.... crossed fingers, booted up.. and my computer was HAPPPPPPPPPPPY!.

It may not be that your power supply just isn't powerful enough anymore... it could just be in the first phases of completely biting the dust... Vue just happens to draw enough power that it showed it first.  Of course, it may NOT be dieing... it just may have so much attached to it it cannot give that video card the power it craves... ;)

You are, indeed, pushing your system to the max - even without that nice video card.  And don't be confused about DS rendering fine and the only one having the issue is Vue... As I said earlier - Vue will eat your resources up and beg for more.  DS, Poser, Bryce, etc - they don't seem to do this.

Can't wait to see the images when you can finally post them =D

Rarer than a hairy egg and madder than a box of frogs....

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