Hi, thanks for looking at this. Recently I bought Sins of a Solar Empire to play on my brand new PC. When the installation finished, I of course started the game. Looked great...for about 30 seconds after the opening cinematic. Out of nowhere my screen is filled by green pixels in a weird looking formation, something close to "..'.." with the apostrophe representing a pixel, and this little formation is replicated all over my screen randomly. Then, all keyboard and mouse functionality stop, and then 1 of 2 things happens. 1: The sound starts to lagggg but still plays. Nothing else really happens, but I'm forced to power off my computer. 2: The sound stops, and then the monitor fails to even sense the presence of a computer thats turned on attached to it, so it idles itself...but then it quickly turns back on with the ever-awesome blue screen of "WINDOWS HAS DETECED AN ERROR. SHUTTING DOWN." In both cases, no error message ever pops up save the blue screen, so there's no obvious cause. Until this happens, the game is awesome, for the 20 seconds to 2 minutes it lasts. I have also installed this game using the very same disc on another computer, so rule out a corrupt disc file/ scratch. Now comes the part where I give you my system specs. Also, heres the minimum requirements for the game to run smoothly. 2.2 GHz Dual core CPU 2 GB of RAM (for vista) 256MB GPU And here's my system Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6850 (4MB L2 Cache,3.0GHz,1333 FSB) 4 GB Corsair Dominator DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz OC'd to 1066MHz (4 DIMMs) 512MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT BTX Motherboard, Vista 32-bit premium Benchmark: Memory read = 7788 MB/s Memory write = 2061 MB/s Memory latency = 60.7 ns 3068 MB of RAM free Directx 10 750w PSU Plus, my case is huge enough and I have enough fans to pretty much rule out that the problem lies with it overheating. Also, please note that I have a VGA output Monitor but a DVI-I output GPU, with an adpater to solve this. Although its trivial, I thought I might add it anyways. Checking my event viewer reveals that "BIOS does not contain an IRQ for the device in PCI slot --" it repeats that message several times, with the -- being replaced with 22. 19, 23, 24, and 3, all in different messages all delivered at precisely the same time. These come along anytime my computer freezes due to the game. YES, I do have the latest drivers for my GPU, monitor, etc. No, the cause cannot be something due to dust, age, defective parts as I can play my other game Battlefield 2 just fine. Which is wierd, because I cranked up the setting for Battlefield 2, and no lag resulted as of it. While Sins is still at the default settings because even if I don't go into the gameplay of Sins, the game will freeze in the main menu. Yeah. That depresses me. The only signifigant update I'm missing is Windows Service Pack 1, which as soon as I post this, I'll start downloading it. So. Are you that person who can tell me exactly what is wrong? Or, if not that, give me something to work off of? Like i've pointed out, nothing is shouting at me "I'm broken! Fix me now!". Rather, my week-old PC is laughing at my attempts to solve this. Just suggest anything you want me to try if you think it will help.

""BIOS does not contain an IRQ for the device in PCI slot --" Move that card to another slot or reset some bios settings. Start with failsafe or default settings as a global edit to help slow down the machine first. As a general rule, games are not well designed to play correctly with all hardware, service packs, and even order of installation. The only way to be sure would be to install a baseline OS and only that game to see if it could work with your system. To top it off there are a billion or two parts in the pc world. Each a bit different. Not all systems even with the same build date that act exactly the same. It may never work. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Have you tried re-installing the game? I know it sounds silly, and judging from your post you've probably already tried it, but it is worth mentioning. Things to try: Patching the game (if available) Updating mobo/graphics drivers. Since it's a new computer you're probably using out of date drivers. Try another game. This helps to find out whether it's a problem with the Sins install or with your hardware. Update Vista. Hope this helps. I've gotten Sins to work on a very similar, but slightly less powerful setup. Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz @ 3.24GHz 3GB Corsair RAM (2x1Gb, 2x512MB) 8800 GTS 320MB Vista x64

Yep, I did all of those within the first day. I have been trying different things for over a week now. My card was artifacting whenever put under stress. Therefore its faulty so I'm going to RMA.

VIDEO CARD DRIVERS....enough said!