FFXI locking up during battle, 2 different vid cardsFollow

Hello, 1st off my setup is this

PC Chips M860 motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
1 gig of RAM
80gig 7200 RPM HD
option of 2 vid cards,
NVIDIA GEForce FX 5500 256 or
ATI Radeon 9550XL 256
3 case fans
Dial-up over AOL

Ok basically my problem is this, I started off with the Nvidia vid card and was having framerate problems (especially with weather and shadows on) and frequently having everything freeze in game and having to reboot the PC to make it work again. After talking to some people at best buy, they suggested upgrading the video card so I went today and bought the ATI card.

Thinking that everything was fixed, I turned back on mipmapping, bumpmapping, everything.. and it looked great for about 3 minutes. Then during battle framerate dropped quickly and then the same problem as before, everything froze up and I had to reboot. I turned off bump-mapping and shadows and it smoothed out framerate, shutting off weather effects made it smooth as silk and more playable than even with the Nvidia card.

I'm wondering if it might be a cooling problem even though I have 2 fans blowing out of the back of the case and one on the side blowing in. Will one of those RAM coolers really make a difference? Seems like it may be the problem considering that everythign worked great and degraded over a matter of minutes. Will I ever be able to turn on all the goodies? Any and all help is much appreciated!

I would say its because of your motherboard. You have a great processor and both video cards should be able to handle FFxi just fine. However, PC Chips motherboards are the cheapest bargain basement P.O.S. out there. They are notorious for using forged chipsets and a large variety of quality control problems. I would recommend you buy a brand name motherboard from a manufacturer with a much better reputation. I personally recommend Abit, Asus and MSI.

Just like anything else, your computer is only as strong as its weakest component. In your situation the motherboard is it.

Well after tweaking and updating everything including using that driver cleaner, I still have the same problem. If I leave bump-mapping off, and turn off shadows and weather, everything runs smoothly. If I turn on any of those 3 I run into problems. I'm gonna start shopping around for a new motherboard and see if that solves the problem. Thanks for the help guys and any suggestions on a particular motherboard are appreciated

Fair enough, I hadn't heard of anything like that recently except for dodgy capactitors on boards.