I can't play Call of Duty 4 with AA on my new rig.  After about 5-10 minutes I get a VPU recovery error.  If I disable VPU recovery notification it merely freezes my system instead.  Whether I use only 1 card or both (crossfire) I get the same thing.  The only solution is to disable AA.  My old 939 system with the same kind of video card (3850) did not have this problem.  Any tips?

Abit AX78, Diamond Radeon 3850 512mb Crossfire, AMD Phenom 9750,  4GB G.Skill PC8500 DDR2.

whenever I got the vpu recovery error in the past it was due to my card being oc'd too high, is your card oc'd?

It's factory overclocked, but I haven't taken it any higher.  The GPU temp is only around 55 when it freezes, which is actually a good temp for a load gpu.  Unless the combo of factory OC + AA is too much. 

I'll try bringing the clocks down a little closer to standard spec and enabling AA and hoping that works.

From personal experience and from what I've read others state, factory OC's can be a mixed bag. With my current card I had to back down the factory OC a hair(core & mem)to achieve 100% stability. I 1st noticed instability in the CS:S video stress test(purple/pink tint on some textures)and immediately checked temps... no problem there, but I down clocked any way to test. Incidentally my framerate was higher after down clocking. So I experimented with all my source games and found that performance was better across the board with clocks set below out of the box spec. Enabling AA/AF was a problem for me at 1st as well, but now I'm able to use some.

My long term plan is to gradually restore both core and memory clocks to their original factory OC's after some more hours of gaming/burning in of the card. If I can ultimately run the card stable at the higher specs, I may try to gradually take the clocks even higher.

Spec/temp overview:

Card: msi 8800GTS(G92) powered by 500w(18Ax2) gfx fan locked @ 54%(best balance of efficiency/noise)

Original factory OC: core 678 mem 972 idle 55c load 70c max

Stable clocks: core 650 mem 950 idle 50c load 66c max

Even lowered clocks didn't help.  Hmm.  Though I noticed my temps were in the 60s when I crashed one time, but that's still not too bad.

60s and even 70s aren't bad at all for current powerful gpus... quite normal infact. Not to say they're excellent, but deffinately safe and should alllow for complete stability. 

Crisis Causer:

After about 5-10 minutes I get a VPU recovery error.

After doing a little searching it seems this might be a driver issue, Crisis. Have a look at THIS thread.

I've actually had this same exact problem (not with crysis, but with Supreme Commander).  It was my memory that was causing the problems.  There were no other programs on my computer that would utilize more than about 2GB of memory at any given time, but Supcom was taking the full amount then freezing the computer when it reached the bad area of RAM that would normally not be used.  I ran memtest for a day and it eventually found the bad areas and I replaced the bad stick.  No problems after that.