as suggested it could be a overheating problem, Does the machine actually say it is shutingdown and do a clean shutdown ? or does it just lose power ? or does it freeze ? first check that your power cable is secure in to the machine and at the wall end if this is ok it could be a failing proccessor fan, this would follow your symptoms of when the you using a lot of processing power, the cpu gets hotter, cpu fans are quite cheap, have a look on www.ebuyer.com, a less likey issue could be some bad pages in memory as graphics packages are quite memory intensive. Give the box a vacum out (remove power dont touch any componants).
Dal, June 2007