Blender Crashing On Render

Hey all,

I’ve been trying to render a few different scenes using Cycles in Blender 2.69 and it seems to crash every time. One scene was previously functioning (probably a few months ago, not sure what version), the other scene is new, but not very complex. When I attempt to render an image in Cycles or in the basic Blender Internal engines Blender locks up. From the Task Manager I can see that the RAM use of Blender skyrockets until it caps and my computer crashes. I am, however, able to use the Blender viewport rendering. For obvious reasons, I would love to resolve this issue.

I have tried reinstalling Blender multiple times.
I have tried rendering various scenes. (The simple starter scene does render successfully).
I have tried using the BI and Cycles engines.

System:
FX-8120
Radeon HD 7970 x2
16GB RAM

I would be happy to supply any additional information that may be required to resolve the problem. This is my best effort to present most of the relevant information.

Are use GPU Compute for rendering with Cycles? If yes, so AMD’s Cards doesn’t supported yet with Cycles.

No, just using the CPU.

It’s also a Windows 8 system, for what that’s worth.