dreigner

as someone who has been using an "alternate" version of the game (yarrr!), i can say that steam isn't likely the cause for this. Admitted to piracy :rolleyes: Banned bben46

if the card is on the way out, then it's really quite disappointing since i've had it less than 12 months. as for the power draw - as i said in my previous post, the card i used prior to my current card had a much higher draw and there were no issues with power. i can play other games pushing my gpu to 100% and not have a single issue there, yet occasionally when playing skyrim i will get the black screen. the only other game that i have which produces the same sort of issue is trackmania 2 canyon when i use the track editor.

Black screening is usually caused by the USER running multiple low level access sensor apps together at once, putting the gpu into an unrecoverable state. use one, and disable gpu sensor access in the others. evga eleet also causes a black screen (as does any hardware mon based apps) when used in conjunction with precision/afterburner. having GPU-Z left running alongside precision and stuff is also a common cause of gpu crashes. though it's a likely cause for some, it still crashes without sensor/monitoring programs running. the card's not overheating - i know that for a fact. the power supply is capable of handling a much larger draw than it currently has, too. these are two problems that many people have had so far in this thread. my ram is fine as i've already replaced older faulty ram from my original build and ran a lengthy torture test in prime95 without issue.

as someone who is using a pirated copy myself, i've had these for some time and they did nothing for my issues. i still get the hard reset black screen at certain areas and sometimes when i get poisoned. i'm getting CTD more often than before, though. i haven't been able to play my save any further than i currently am due to it crashing the moment i try to head towards a town. if they work for some of you, then that's great. the issue still remains and until bethesda get the creation kit out, i don't see the problems going away any time soon on behalf of their efforts. modders end up doing a better job of fixing problems these days than the developers.

the majority of new PCs getting built now for enthusiasts have at least a 650W power supply. your post holds true for people who have older machines and are throwing new pieces in there to avoid replacing the other parts, but for new builds it's unlikely to be the case outside of faulty equipment or, in the case of some prebuilt PCs, the company trying to squeeze more money out of you by using cheap, shitty quality parts. anyone who has been able to run an nvidia 8800 model card will know that the power draw on those were almost shameful. subsequently, the 9800GT/GTX/GTX+ cards were very much the same. both cards were also amazing performance wise. if people have been able to use those cards previously in their machines, they shouldn't have any problem with newer cards and power consumption. again, though, it never hurts to check your parts and equipment to make sure everything is up to standard if you are upgrading an older machine.

actually, the thread was originally about fill system crashes that required a hard reset. people still continue to post CTD issues even after we stated it wasn't a CTD thread.

kernel-power just means the pc lost power before a proper shutdown occurred. your issue could be any number of things. i suggest you grab monitoring tools like gpu-z and cpu-z/coretemp and have them keep a log of sensor data while you play. the logs can then be imported into an excel worksheet for you to look at voltages and temperatures.

THIS IS SKYRIM! sorry, but someone had to do it. :wink:

UPDATE: no crashes for a month ... but then it returned. First on Skyrim and then it spread over a couple of days to other things. Lots of debug later, I established that positioning a portable fan blowing on the POWER SUPPLY INTAKE stopped the crashes. I've now replaced the power supply and all is good. Why Skyrim? Perhaps because it puts load on GPU and CPU and combined they push a marginal supply over the edge. There is no obvious clue in HWINFO except 12V droops to 11.75, not conclusive you'll always find that voltage readings are never exact. this doesn't necessarily affect things unless you see a sharp increase/decrease in voltage over any given moment when the performance load hasn't changed. for example: gpu usage at 98% with the 12v reading at 12.15v then suddenly it drops to 10.95v while gpu load is still 98% indicates that either the power supply is damaged/faulty or aged OR that the capacitors on the card aren't holding charge like they should. minor variations (+/- 0.5v) are within acceptable limits.

unsure why you chose vista instead of 7 but to each their own. i did a half-yearly reinstall of windows at the beginning of december and encountered the same issues i had before, but after repairing all of the MS c++ redists i barely had any problems with the game. also for those of you who have the game crash when you open the map, are you using the ini tweak to turn off the bloodspatter effect? that particular tweak is guaranteed to cause CTD, but occasionally it can cause a full system crash.

protip: nvidia users have the same issue! i've more or less removed my black screen crashes recently and even though i still get the occasional one, it's mostly CTD now. telling people that they're reiterating stupid advice just because "you fixed your problem so this must be the way to fix everyone else's problem" is plain rude and just shows that you're a fool. suggesting that people switch cards completely isn't fixing the issue, either. if someone was to keep entering your house without your permission and there was the possibility of having the faulty lock fixed by someone but instead someone else said "you should just move house. yeah, that's how i fixed my problem. since moving house i haven't had anyone enter it without my permission," what would you do? have someone fix the lock or just move house because someone else said that it was how they "fixed" their problem? seeing as there have been a range of suggestions posted and some work for some people while others don't and vice versa, i think the best method would be trying fixes that aren't going to cost money to begin with. new expenses due to software faults should be a last resort.

this thread isn't for crash to desktop problems. you'll have to look around in other threads relating specifically to crash to desktop.

something that i'd like everyone to test, please: download the microsoft visual c++ 2005, 2008 and 2010 distributable packages and run each of them (starting with '05). you should be given an option to repair them (seeing as they'll probably already be installed if you have a lot of games) and it's possible that these may decrease the likelihood of the black screen crashes. i recently reformatted and went with a fresh windows install from the ground up. no service pack and no updates. i found that after running skyrim on both a new save and my previous saves that the game would crash pretty quickly as soon as i left a city, dungeon or cave. after that i updated the game to 1.3 and noticed no change except a slight improvement in fame rate. after that i downloaded all of the updates that fixed compatibility and stability issues within windows and still continued to have crashes but not as frequently. once i did the repair on each of the distributable packages and installed the updates for those, i found that the game ran almost flawlessly unless i was around water or my screen had either blood spatter or "poison blur" present. neither of these two can be disabled without causing crashes upon opening the world map. this leads me to believe that the game was not tested on a diverse set of hardware and as such our problems may be something to do with the game's engine calling references incorrectly when trying to render water or on-screen effects depending on certain hardware. even though you may not have water in your view when the crash occurs, there may still be a small stream being rendered in the distance. standing outside of whiterun is a good example: walls all around you and no water in sight unless you go around a wall - but the water is still rendered.

there are a lot of us who are still on 1.1 though. i refuse to update a game until i know for sure that a game breaking issue has been fixed.

if it is RAM/savegame related, then that's something that currently carries over from the PS3 version of the game. i feel sorry for PS3 users, since some save games are hitting sizes upwards of 19MBs, effectively preventing them from being played due to the PS3 not being able to free up its own memory. for those who don't quite understand what i'm getting at: skyrim loads the bare essentials to get started - this takes up space when you load a game, variables are put into play and the area around you is loaded - more space taken up when a save gets larger, more and more variables get loaded from said save, since they're flagged as having been active - the further you are in the save, the more variables since the PS3 only has 256MB of RAM to play with for anything that isn't graphics, the system grinds to a halt when that capacity has been reached.