Intermittent crashes, what is best video?

[olepi]

I'm playing on the mainland, and have a 3400 Athlon, 1gb ram, and a ATI 9800 Pro. The game will crash (freezes) sometimes, or go for hours other times. When it does freeze, I have to do a power recycle to reboot, it is a hard crash.

I was thinking of upgrading the graphics; what is the best ATI card supported? Or is there another reason for all the crashes?

I don't think it is overheating, since I can play for hours sometimes. Last night, the game froze in the first 10 minutes, and then was fine for the next 5 hours. Should I try to reset the graphics settings? and if so, what should I set them to?

Any help appreciated.
BP

[Zerlin]

System freezing is usually due to CPU overheating.

Make sure everything is dust free and that all fans are working and rotating smoothly.

As to video, the 9800 Pro is very capable of handling Ryzom.
I have an ATI 9800, a GeForce 4 MX 460 ToGo and an ATI Radeon 9000 IGP.
All three run Ryzom and the 9800 is the one where I have all settings maxed out.
The other two I have settings set to minimum and the IGP has all of the advanced options disabled and has lots of lag as it really is not made for gaming.

[khyle]

Make sure your system is not overclocked (RAM/CPU). You might actually underclock your system for analysis, if there are still freezes, the problem lies elsewhere
Not all mainboards work well with all RAMs, and too tight timings can cause the freezes you experience.

[magick1]

If not a heat problem, try running the game with no other programs running.
If it still fails do a RAM check and check that your PSU is okay (BTW does it have enough "juice" for the hardware in you computer?). If you can, run some monitoring software of temp and voltages (with logging).