Age of Empires III hard crashing

[Gonad the Barbarian]

OK this has turned into the most aggravating 10 cents I have ever spent. This game continually crashes on me, anywhere from 10-45 minutes after starting a game. It's a hard crash, black screen, monitor shuts down, buzzing over speakers, have to do a hard shutdown to reset. This machine has been rock solid since I've had it, passed memtest and 2+ hours of running Prime95 & Furmark together, so memory, CPU, video card, heat, and power supply are all pretty much ruled out. Rig is:

Win7 64 bit
C2D E6550
Radeon 4850
Realtek HD audio
3 gigs of RAM

Nothing is overclocked and all the drivers and updates are current. I've tried running in XP compatibility mode and forcing single core to no avail. Anyone else having problems or have any suggestions?

 

[Agman]

I read in the live forums that it might help to install latest .NET 4 framework. Though if your running Windows 7 I don't see why the latest wouldn't be installed. I dunno

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Well after a myriad of other attempts I disabled GPU recovery and so far no locks. I'll know for sure tomorrow when I can play more if it's fixed or not. Here's how to do that if anyone's interested:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/wddm_timeout.mspx
I don't know what's special about my setup, if this in fact was the problem I figured more folks would be running into it.

 

[JSt0rm]

what do you expect for .10 cents?

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Well, that didn't fix it. God damn.

 

[HybridSquirrel]

your video card isnt good enough. aoe3 requires quad sli minimum....

 

[lolowa]

HybridSquirrel stand correct, you need a better graphics card

 

[RavenSEAL]

I've ran this game for 10 hours straight on my onboard GPU, its your computer lol.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Thanks for the help guys, really.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Thanks for the help guys, really.

I don't really think there is anything we could've helped you with. AOE3 can run on an a decent onboard GPU @ 1080p @40 FPS.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

It's the comments like that that help immensely in adding to my frustration over this. I actually want to play this stupid 10 cent game, and it's the only one I've played on this machine to have problems.

 

[DivideBYZero]

Yeah, AoE3 runs on pretty much anything. It's also a really good game.