A machine completely turning off under load (not rebooting, which would indicate a hidden BSOD) typically results from overheating or a weak/failing PSU.

Elemental will max out both of your CPU's, if your PSU is faltering it might not be able to handle that load. In addition while the graphics arent ZOMG HD! they do hit the videocards pretty hard.

No one else has this issue? It's still doing this through the past two updates. My PC is rock solid, I have no problems with any other games. This game shuts my machine off within 5 minutes of starting it. I find it hard to believe that the response I got from Stardock is that my PC is bunk and it has nothing to do with their game. I'm supposed to start replaing parts in my PC in hopes this game eventually works? I can play WoW for 8 hours straight and with this game I can't even get past character creation and I'm being told my PC is overheating or I have a bad PSU? Not much support there from Stardock I'm afraid.

I am basically screwed now because I showed support and pre-ordered this game instead of waiting for a demo. I would not have purchased this game if I had known I would not be able to play it. My only recourse is to hope that some time before release whatever is causing this is fixed in a patch.

I'm not very happy about this.

I had the exact same issue through pretty much all of beta 2 and 3A.  I too assumed it was an overheating issue but monitoring my temps showed I wasn't running any hotter than other games.  PSU could be failing but I doubt it, I'm running a high end 750W psu, and again nothing else triggers it. 

I just figured it was a nasty bug that would get sorted out.  3B seems to have fixed it for me though.  I've played this build for several hours now and had nothing worse than a single CTD. 

WOW will exert minimal use on a modern processor. Pushing your cpu to 100% versus WOW is likely to make a big difference in temp, even on a well-cooled machine.

You may wish to download a free temperature monitoring program (if one doesn't come with your motherboard) and check it out when under heavy load.

I do play many other games as well. I have not experienced my PC turning off during any other gaming experience. I have also, as another user stated, turned my PC on in the morning and tried when everything is cool and the same thing happens, I cannot even get past creating a character (unless I hurry) before my PC trns off. I have a 900 watt PSU as well.

I've tried various screen resolutions as well as windowed mode and have updated my video drivers to the lastest version.

I take some solace in the mention of another user that an update sorted out their problem and will hope a future update will fix my problem I just do not like getting a blanket comment from Stardock that there is something wrong with my machine end-of-story.

One of the developers (CariElf on these forums) said that she had found and fixed a problem that caused an Elemental process to keep running after the game supposedly terminated.  I thought that she had said that it was fixed in .90, but I can't find her post to confirm it.  I've noticed in my playing with .90 that after the Elemental window goes away, an Elemental process continues to run for several minutes, but eventually goes away.  In previous beta releases I had noticed the process continuing to run until I killed it with task manager.

Perhaps I'm misremembering that it was fixed in .90, or perhaps she didn't kill it as dead as she would have liked.