I got the same problems as you. I tried EVERYTHING (changing hardware, tweaking bios, changing graphics settings, using different drivers, you name it) for about 2 months to get the damn thing to work for more than 15 minutes in 3D games, but it just kept on freezing. I believe that the first few batches of radeon8500's were just buggy because they were initially supposed to run at much lower clock speeds, but ATI needed to bump them up to compete with nvidia. Newer cards have much better results. The only thing that kind of helped for me was to underclock the video card to 250/250, or even as low as 225/225. Sucks, but the 2D and DVD playback is still purty at least...