First off let me say I love the bit of game I've played so far, just need some support on The game crashing windows. I've done a bit of debugging my self and followed all 'tips' I've seen.

Ok here's the problem, I was able to play Fallout: New Vegas for about 4 hours straight, with the only error being some texture corruption (I think caused by opening the pipboy and game menu, and then exiting both every fast), but after leaving Primm by whole system started crashing. Windows, the game, everything, like i just hit the power button. No blue screen, no crash back to windows, just black and a system reboot. Before and after the Steam patch released last night!!

I am running a fairly new system, and before you ask all manufacture drivers have been installed correctly. The system has antiquate cooling (I even performed stress tests on both the CPU and GPU, with zero errors). And I am able to play other AAA titles for extender periods like L4D2, Bioshock2, and Borderlands. The system is not or ever been overclocked.

here is my system specs

- Windows 7 home premium 64bit
- INTEL CORE i7 930 2.80G - 4 Cores
- 6G Ram CORSAIR CMP6GX3M3A1600C7
- ASUS P6X58D-E X58 R
- INTEL SSD 80G - OS drive
- WD 1TB - Steam/Game drive
- nVidia 9800gt XFX
- Steam pre-order Fallout New Vegas


To continue my story, after I left Primm the game/system started crashing. It started out crashing after 10 minutes of play, but ever crash it seems to get progressively worse. 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 1 minute of game play before a crash. And now it's so bad after trying various 'fixes' it crashes while loading my quicksave. Weirdest part is, I reinstalled Fallout 3 vanilla and get the same type of crash after selecting my six in a new game (about 1-2 minutes in) Can anyone please help me??

Here are the fixes I've tried

- Install windows XP, same crashing
- Lastest official video drivers and beta drives, no effect
- FFshow drivers and black listed fallout, nothing
- Quad Core ini file fixes (read on some forum about enabling multi-threads in Fallout 3)
- Reinstalled game
- older & new game saves
- reinstalled MS .net & MS Visual C++ 2008/2010 Redistributable
- disable AA
- disable intro movies
- revalidated game files with Steam

When I get home I'll try installing an older ATI graphics card, but I doubt it will have much of an effect and I was able to play Fallout 3 just fine on a different system with my nVidia 9800GT. I will also try reinstalling Oblivion and see if that has the same problem.

Seriously I've spent way more time debugging this game than actually playing it!! svckS

edit: sp
edit: will post DX Diagnostic when i get home

Ok so I replaced my nVidia 9800GT with a ATI Radeon 3600 and now the game doesn't crash. Played 5+ hours smoothly. Guess this game is just very picky about video cards.

If any one else is experiencing game/system crashes every 5-20 minutes I would suggest using an ATI card or try older nVidia drivers.

I would agree that for the 9800, a test of drivers such as 197.xx might be in order. A few people have had trouble with Radeons in Fallout NV, but it's Geforces more than anything else, acting up in this game, and Driver Changes from nVIDIA were causing trouble in Fallout 3.