Thanks, unfortunately nope, no news. I am going to send my PC away and let them run some tests. Hopefully it's something inexpensive.

It seems so far a broken 3d card seems the most likely cause.

RAM is not the issue, processor is fine, power supply works fine, hard disks are working better than ever... the beeps when booting after the crash seems to indicate a video card issue.

I can't rule out two other things though. One of them being a broken motherboard, the other being a driver/software/Windows XP issue.

Yup, theoretically it could be a driver issue, apparently ATI cards have suffered from something similar to this sometime in 2007.

But it would hardly make sense in my case as I have been using 8.2 drivers and newer drivers for many many months.

Cheers