Have come across a new problem of late. After about five to seven minutes in the sim, I get a crash to black however the sound is still working. Upgraded to a GTX 470 a couple of weeks ago, am using the 257.21 drivers. I am wondering if this sounds like a video issue as I still have sound and can work my out to the desktop. There is no error given for this event. Any input welcome.

Sounds like an overheating problem of the graphics card CPU. Are you sure the fan on the card is working ? Are all the other fans in the PC case working and unobstructed ?Good luck.Hans

Vid card running at about 40C. CPU runs FS at about 45-48C. As I have worked on this, seems this problem is isolated to the KMEM area. Removed all add-on stuff for that area but the problem persists. Have tried many aircraft but the only one that does not suffer with this problem is the default Cessna. To further complicate, at times it is just a screen freeze (with sound) and not the crash to black. Am really stumped by this one.

Just to add another twist to this issue, it appears that it only happens at night. If this were a texture problem there would be a "texture.dll" warning correct? Wondering if there could be a missing or corrupted night texture in the area of KMEM.

JoeHad a similar problem with my old coal burning PC the other day. The problem dissappeared when I redid all my cloud textures to straight 32 bit in Flight Environment (was playing with frame rates, seemed my machine doesn't like DTX3 textures). But if the card isn't overheating I'd suspect that there is a texture in the area that doesn't quite fit. By the way, I got no error messages at all for my problem.Jack

I had somewhat the same problem: Always at night, with a specific repaint I downloaded for the PMDG 747. That repaint was the problem. When I stopped using it, the crashes stopped. So, together with what Jack said: look at textures, not hardware. Some texture file might be a problem. Did you try other planes? Have you tried your plane, with that repaint, at other places?

Thanks for the input guys. I have tried several planes all with the same result. The only one to make it to the runway was the default Cessna. I have tried my aircraft of choice at the same time of night at different fields without a hitch. So I quess I need to take a look at ground and cloud textures and see what happens.

It would appear...after reinstalling my default ground textures that were backed up by GE Pro, this problem is solved. Made several nitetime ventures out of KMEM in different planes without incident. Thanks to those who made suggestions.