Hello world Guess what.... Yes, I have the same problem. And there are a few solutions. I can play a lot of games without BSOD, but there are a few games like Skyrim, that can crash the whole machine. First of all: Mainly it is because of the bad multithreading-programming of Bethesda, but it has also to do something with cheep components of some graphics cards from some companies. So...the whole toppic is not a new toppic. A lot of Fallout 3 gamers have (or had) the same problems. And now you can guess again.......yeeeeesss......it is from Bethesda. But the community found a workaround that was never implemented into an official patch. Until Christmas I played Oblivion (again Bethesda) and there was not a single crash after 200 hours (or something like that). Now I am playing Skyrim and I had too many crashes, but during the last 20 hours everything worked fine with a little workaround. What I did: 1. TESV.exe -> properties -> compatibility -> Select the Run This Program in Compatibility Mode option, set it to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 AND disable visual themes AND disable desktop composition (and maybe some of you select the option to run the program as an administration). 2. Skyrim.ini -> go to [General] and add the line "iNumHWThreads=3" 3. Skyrim.ini -> got to [HAVOK] an add the line "iNumThreads=1" 4. Taskmanager -> set the process priority of TESV.exe to Above Normal 5. Taskmanager -> set the CPUs of TESV.exe to 0 and 1 and deactivate all the other CPUs (CPU cores). 6. Deactivate the Steam Community of the Steam client. 7. Deactivate FSAA. Why this helped the Fallout 3 gamers? Fallout 3 (and Skyrim) is horribly programmed. In this case it is the multithreading part. When there is a synchronization problem with lots of threads it is better to reduce the number of threads and the number of CPUs that are handling those threads. That is the reason why it does not matter if it is an AMD or Intel CPU, and why the game is (normally) running better when there are 1 or 2 CPUs (cores). So...this explains the lines 2, 3, 4 and 5. To line 1: In some cases the deaktivation of Aero makres a big difference. I do not know why. But I do know, that Aero is using more graphics power, and sometimes it interfers with running games. Line 6: The pop-ups of the Steam client during a running fullscreen game can crash a game crash or make it run unstable. Line 7: FSAA seems to produce other stability problems on some machines. You can also automate the taskmanager part. There are a few programs that can do this. I am using Process Lasso. It is free and you must not register and pay. But there are other tools that are really easy to use. And now to the hardware part. It is true, that some graphics cards are producing more BSODs than others. Some time ago an interesting info was leaked. For example there were lots of AMD 5750 cards from a few big companies that were crashing because of some cheep electric components that were out of reference and not working properly. I can not remember which components exactly and which companies. But I remember AMD 57xx and 68xx and NV2?X and there where some other cards. The problem had something to do with voltage and/or MHz of the graphics RAM, and switching from low speed to full speed. So...you already know the corresponding workaround: reduce the graphics RAM clock by 100 MHz or more. For example (AMD5750/AMD6750): 1150MHz -> 1050MHz. For such a weak card it is no good advice to do this, because the bottleneck of this card is the RAM speed. If you are using the software workaround the hardware workaround should not be neccessary. Yeeeeesss.... I know. Some of you would say: "How can a software workaround fix a hardware issue?" There I say: "Because of a creepy multithreading programming that is not working propperly with the multithreading supporting part of the graphics driver." And there you can say: "So it is the bad driver!" And there I reply: "No, Bethesda is showing a lack of programming standards." etc etc etc. Just a question: How many games are you playing that are crashing your system? The software workaround may look like a big loss of fps, but that is not true, because Skyrim has no fully functional multithreading graphics engine (if it is multithreading at all). My loss of fps is hardly noticeable, and I have definitely no high end PC. So....try this workaround. Work with it. Try to optimize it. Watch your fps. Write tickets to Bethesda. Stop flaming around and concentrate on the problem. And write tickets to Bethesda. Stop digging around inside your hardware. If a burning test of Furmark on 1 CPU core and torturing test of Prime95 on the other cores can not crash your PC within 10 minutes -> your CPU, graphics card and power supply and cooling is OK. But I would not advice to run such a cruel test, because it could destroy your good hardware. Kind regards from Germany
