Skyrim complete PC crashes

[Netrogor]

Since a thread I posted in isn't getting any replies, and I found this one, quoting and adding what I've said thar, to this. Oh, and I went to sleep leaving my laptop on a burn-test using Furmark - it was still going, warm but with a notable peak of 66 degrees Celsius, after more than six hours, when I got up seven this morning (-5:00 EST).

 

EDIT:

I'm going to see if I can't get a copy of NVidia drivers from 2011... see if Skyrim works using those (it was fine up till I took a break from playing it five months ago), though I sincerely doubt it.

 

Been googling for others who've encountered issues similar to what I've hit' date=' and I'm rather curious - other people who have had such issues simply never received replies, and the issue seems to have never been addressed...

 

So, here's a breakdown -

I have a Sony vpcf122fx laptop. I used to play Skyrim on it all the time, and other than the occasional CTD from loading up too many mods, it was flawless. Now, after some months, my wife has gotten herself a laptop as well (with Windows 8 on it), and she's playing Skyrim... which made me want to play again.

I'm not a scrub when it comes to computers, been building and fixing them since before I could read, and I know how to run memtest86, furmark, and other programs to stress-test my PCs, in addition to checking temps and figuring out if it's an overheating issue.

On load my laptop has managed to peak at 65 degrees Celsius running Furmark on a burn-test for an hour. Used to peak up to 69 degrees, but I took it apart after the issues started up last week (with trying to play this game again) thinking perhaps there was a heating issue, and put MX-2 thermal grease down (the stock grease was globbed on horrifically, thank God I found an excuse to do that s*** myself) on the CPU and GPU.

 

Specs (as I've modified a few things) are as follows ->

CPU- Intel Corei7 @ 1.73GHz w/Turbo Boost to 2.93GHz

GPU- NVidia GT330M

RAM- 8GB Kingston Memory @ 1600MHz 9-9-9-27 timings (stock, though the laptop only had 2x2GB sticks, I upgraded it, and yes that was done before I stopped playing Skyrim early this year, and no issues arose from the upgrade)

HDD- 300GB Western Digital @ 7200rpm (stock was a 500GB seagate, which died on me, as one would expect from seagate HDs)

 

I can play... ohhh lets think... any other game for any period of time without my laptop shutting down or restarting itself.

Natural Selection 2

Dawn of War 2

COD Modern Warfare 3

Mount&Blade (+ Warband expansion)

Cortex Command

And so many others I flit about during my downtime...

 

Now, considering NS2 requires an immensely superior machine to run it compared to Skyrim... and it runs fine and dandy under the most extreme conditions... me tinkz that there is an issue with Skyrim, specifically.

ATM I'm going to rock a clean-wipe of my audio drivers, and put specific Win7-64bit ones I grabbed from the realtek website (I already performed a clean-boot after wiping my HD and reinstalling my O/S with only the drivers from its out-of-box stage, then installed Skyrim, patches, and the mods I want, and tried running it with and without mods).

I'll get back to ya'll if the audio driver update fixes it, otherwise post something that perhaps wasn't openly posted for others.

 

EDIT:

Oh, and the only thing that pops up in the Event Viewer... ID41, Kernel-Power 63. No crash or dump logs.

 

EDIT2:

Oh, and when it freezes up, blacks out the screen, and goes to shutdown... the audio continues to play for a second or two, without skipping, as though all is fine.[/quote']

Edited November 26, 2012 by Netrogor

[Netrogor]

Potential solution ->

 

So, after reading into NVidia GPUs for awhile, I discovered something called, "Performance Levels." My card (GT330M) has P0, P1, and P2/12.

P0 is the idle state, when the GPU is below 10% activity, as determined by... WINDOWS!

P1, I believe, is below 40% activity.

And P2 is full on gaming, when it recognizes that you are indeed gaming.

 

Having real-time logs made and repeatedly allowing Skyrim to shut my laptop down, I discovered that just before every crash, the voltage on the card dropped to P0 state (going from 0.95V to 0.8V), while the clocks remained at P2 state. Oh JOY! Of course my laptop would shutdown when the GPU is trying to run at full power, without having full power!

 

For now, I've underclocked the P1 and P2 states (using NVidia inspector) so that the sudden loss of power won't shut my laptop down (it's working... so far, got almost an hour in Skyrim, and haven't managed more than ten minutes since this s*** began).

I am very tempted to look into a GPU bios editor (i.e.- Fermi Bios Editor) to adjust the way the P0/P1/P2/12 states work, so that P0 is the equivalent of P1, and P1 and P2 are always at full-blast.

 

This doesn't mean everyone's sharing the same problem, mind you - just one unique bit that I discovered for myself (and will thoroughly test by playing the f*** outta Skyrim, until it either fails or I feel satisfied).

[longtomjr]

Hey guys... I had the same problem.

my specs:

Nvidia GF 210 512g

Intel dual core CPU

2Gig ra memory

Foxcon Motherbord... (don't know witch)

On-bord sound

 

I play this in windowed mode with meduim and that unoficial pach... (not gonna metion the name, I dont want to get kicked on my firs day)

 

I tested this while watching my father play Heroes 3 of might and magic on his desktop just behind me. So i can easy see when the screen LED go Orange and crashes my vid.

I was only in my home screen for 25+- minuites and then it go kabooom. So I did some proper sience and tweaked only one tweak per time....

Just put of your screensaver and not turn of your monitor.

This worked for me and made perfect sense. Skyrim grabs your mouse and then the PC don't detect movement from you input at all and then goes the screensaver and your graphics fail. The old fart (my dad) said he experienced that in quite a few games in "the olden days." So I thought I will register and see how other skyrims respond. If you have a notebook you must put your timeouts of.

 

IMPORTANT: This is just a fix that worked for me, you can try that but there is no guarantee whatsoever. Pls post your results here.

 

Regards

LTJR

[spleek]

Netrogor, you've gone above and beyond the call of duty to figure out that it really -is- a problem with the game - not your system. I just hope you don't waste any more time or money on trying to work around bad engineering and slack development on Bethesda's part. I still think the crashes are based on bad calls to the video card by the game engine - and they are made worse sometimes by mods, but I'm not an engineer and at the end of the day I dont care - I spent money and I expect sh*t to work. I've never encountered this many problems with a game in my life.

 

I've also gone through all my mods and kept them to a bare minimum of the most reputable ones. Though mods add a level of instability, they're also needed because often they're gameplay fixes or features Bethesda should have implemented already if they were doing their job and not just riding on the efforts of the mod community.

 

I just hope another company like Valve can make a game like Skyrim, and actually do it justice. It's a great genre/world, but it deserves commitment, not to mention better gameplay and story development. (ex: endlessly going into basically the same dungeon, and doing the same tasks over and over again).

[Netrogor]

Thank you, though I had a lot of motivation from my wife.

Her playing Skyrim on a laptop she got for her birthday a few weeks ago, right next to me, as my laptop shutdown at random trying to, drove me to figure it out.

 

What it boils down to - Q&A. Quality Assurance. Some major titles are void of such simple work, because big-name publishers (i.e.- EA Games) want to release on a certain day.

I think Bethesda's last Q&A approved release was Morrowind, TBH.

 

EDIT:

Fixed spelling mistakes - also in the service (Army Corps of Engineers) and just got up an hour ago (0400) for a special, mandatory Christmas FRG. Still waking up.

Edited December 1, 2012 by Netrogor

[Threemoons]

 

 

EDIT:

Fixed spelling mistakes - also in the service (Army Corps of Engineers) and just got up an hour ago (0400) for a special, mandatory Christmas FRG. Still waking up.

 

Thank you for all of your service--both to this online community and to this country! :D

[xtecnro]

So my Skyrim started to crash not randomly, but the very second I am about to complete a mission (currently the Summerset Shadows, Optional Burn the Banner Quest).

 

I do have plenty of mods installed, but nothing new was added when the game decided to start crashing. This has never happened until now. Peculiar that it started so randomly. Anyone else having this issue of crashing when it never has before??

 

My PC: Dell XPS14 - Core i7, GeForce GT 425M (Ver. 306.97)

 

My character is a level 49 Redguard.

 

EDIT: Been playing for a couple of hours when I loaded a previous save with ALL mods on . . . weird.

Edited December 12, 2012 by xtecnro

[writer2036]

Just an update to say I still haven't had any more black screen hard reset crashes since I upgraded my graphics card to an AMD HD 2GB 7870. However if I try to put the video settings up to ultra over a period of days or weeks my Skyrim becomes incredibly unstable and starts crashing to desktop majorly and often. At High setting it really tries to crash constantly and I keep hearing the weird clicking noise that it used to make just before it would black screen but nothing happens now and that noise goes away for about 10 minutes. So I also think that having a 2GB high end graphics card is also what is keeping my system from crashing as previously I played skyrim on 1GB graphics cards. Although it is a costly upgrade especially if it is only Skyrim that won't play for you. I also noticed that the closer I get to having 50 mods installed the more skyrim bugs out and wants to crash. It seems to run better if I keep mods down to a maximum of 45.

[xtecnro]

Just an update to say I still haven't had any more black screen hard reset crashes since I upgraded my graphics card to an AMD HD 2GB 7870. However if I try to put the video settings up to ultra over a period of days or weeks my Skyrim becomes incredibly unstable and starts crashing to desktop majorly and often. At High setting it really tries to crash constantly and I keep hearing the weird clicking noise that it used to make just before it would black screen but nothing happens now and that noise goes away for about 10 minutes. So I also think that having a 2GB high end graphics card is also what is keeping my system from crashing as previously I played skyrim on 1GB graphics cards. Although it is a costly upgrade especially if it is only Skyrim that won't play for you. I also noticed that the closer I get to having 50 mods installed the more skyrim bugs out and wants to crash. It seems to run better if I keep mods down to a maximum of 45.

 

Thanks for the info, I'll give that a try and turn down my settings to reduce the frequency of my desktop crashes! (at least let's hope that is what happens)

[ginnyfizz]

If you have clicking, you can't get Ultra with that card and it crashes on High, then I am sorry to say but you have bigger problems. And I speak as someone who had heap big problems recently. (Like new HDD, MOBO, CPU and PSU big) I think you may have some particularly unhappy hardware there.