Blender crashes during Cycles render

I’m new to blender and I was just finishing off this tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y__uzGKmxt8) when I tried to render my final image and blender crashed halfway through the render. The scene is not very complex (It’s a mug, a plane, a camera, and an emission plane) and I have tried many things to make it work, but none have been successful. The only exception is when I set the resolution to 25% (of 1080p), halved the tile size, and set the sampling to 125, but that produced a very low quality image and only worked the third time I tried it, crashing the first two times around.

Does anyone have an idea of what could be causing this or how to fix it? Your help is greatly appreciated!

System specs:
i5-3570k OC’d to 4.2 GHz
8GB Ram
AMD HD 6670 1GB VRAM
Windows 8.1 64 bit

Blender V 2.71

Thanks!