Skyrim complete PC crashes

[corban122]

Played Skyrim since 13 November. Game crashes my hard drive; screen (TV) goes black and drive on computer SHUTS OFF COMPLETELY, requiring a push-the-power-button reboot. These two events are simultaneous; I note no audio continuation at all.

 

With an issue like this, I would check a couple things. Are you running a raid? If so, is it your own controller or running off your mobo? Check to see if their's a raid controller update. (For example, intel is the controller on my motherboard, so I can find updates to it specifically @ intel.com )

 

It could also be a power issue. Try temporarily removing non essentially components from being powered and see if the issue continues. (IE: CD/DVD Rom, Floppy, etc. etc.)

 

What I'm assuming is you're hearing the hard drives 'click' off. I would still wait (say 10 minutes) in this state to see if anything happens @ all. Sometimes a blank screen can indicate a Video Card Hardware failure.

You could also be having a cascading failure. IE: 1 piece fails, shorting out everything as it goes.

 

I will say your initial description definitely would have me leaning heavily towards a hardware issue of some kind. Good luck in your troubleshooting. :-)

 

@ DolAtoR , Good luck. If you've been fine for 100 hours, I'd approach it as a "something has changed in your game to use more resources". Perhaps try creating a new temporary game and open the map. It could be that the 'filled out' map has something to it?

Edited December 1, 2011 by corban122

[renegadex]

Played Skyrim since 13 November. Game crashes my hard drive; screen (TV) goes black and drive on computer SHUTS OFF COMPLETELY, requiring a push-the-power-button reboot. These two events are simultaneous; I note no audio continuation at all.

 

With an issue like this, I would check a couple things. Are you running a raid? If so, is it your own controller or running off your mobo? Check to see if their's a raid controller update. (For example, intel is the controller on my motherboard, so I can find updates to it specifically @ intel.com )

 

It could also be a power issue. Try temporarily removing non essentially components from being powered and see if the issue continues. (IE: CD/DVD Rom, Floppy, etc. etc.)

 

What I'm assuming is you're hearing the hard drives 'click' off. I would still wait (say 10 minutes) in this state to see if anything happens @ all. Sometimes a blank screen can indicate a Video Card Hardware failure.

You could also be having a cascading failure. IE: 1 piece fails, shorting out everything as it goes.

 

I will say your initial description definitely would have me leaning heavily towards a hardware issue of some kind. Good luck in your troubleshooting. :-)

 

@ DolAtoR , Good luck. If you've been fine for 100 hours, I'd approach it as a "something has changed in your game to use more resources". Perhaps try creating a new temporary game and open the map. It could be that the 'filled out' map has something to it?

You didn't mention which video card you have, but I had the "drive clicking off" and map screen issues before I updated to the beta nVidia video drivers. I still get a VERY occasional crash, but nothing as reproducibly bad as before.

[kleyton]

Fight with BSODs in TES Skyrim continue, seems i found right way and first tests giving positive results. In simulated stress conditions BSOD appeared after several hundred of meters traveling the world, now without BSOD i can run x10 times speed something around 10 minutes. More complex tests on their way, may be i'll find the way to elliminate the problem completely, if my hard drive will not die before. Thanks Bethesda, very much appreciated!

THIS IS FROM ENBSERIES BORIS VORONTSOV http://enbdev.com/index_en.html

[Drakhaoul]

Okay, I seem to have fixed my problem. Basically, all I did was turn my cooling fan up to full power. Seems my problem was that my graphic card was overheating.

 

Also, I did some searching on a whim, and came to the conclusion that in most cases this must be a hardware issue, and not just a problem caused by Skyrim. There's dozens of posts over the internet describing the exact same problem. Screen turning off, sound looping and finally computer shutting off/rebooting.

 

Just a short list of the first two pages of games with this problem found through a general search for no specific game in google with the search words "Black Screen computer crash game":

 

- Fable III

- Call of Duty: Black Ops

- Brink

- Rift

- Witcher

- Dead Space

 

The list goes on. These are quite graphics intensive games, so I don't think it is really wrong assuming that these might be caused by overheating.

 

To find out if anything in your computer might be overheating, try a program like MSI-Afterburner or something along these lines to check if there's a temperature issue. It's safe to say that anything above 95 °C is too much most of the time.

 

If anything in your computer is overheating, and you have the option to do so, try turning up your cooling fan (finally, buying that oversized cooling fan with the option to manually regulate the speed pays off. Yay! ^_^ ), and maybe also clean out fan and computer case (if you don't do that regularly anyway).

 

I wish everyone success. These crashes suck. >_<

 

 

I've run multiple hardware tests and I know that my video card, PSU and CPU are all operating at perfectly acceptable temperatures. I've tried cleaning my PC of dust and reseating the RAM. Furthermore of those games you listed I play Brink and Rift on completely maxed settings and not ONCE has my PC crashed while playing them. This is NOT a heating issue.

 

My specs:

 

AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2GHz

64 bit Quad-Core Processor

8GB DDR3 1333MHz

AMD Radeon HD 6870

(Running Windows 7 - 64 bit)

 

Also if people could please stop posting about desktop crashes, BSOD, main menu issues and screen freezes. If you have any of those problems you should go make your own thread, this one is about a very specific problem that we're trying to troubleshoot. I don't mean to offend anyone but if you're PC isn't rebooting you aren't having the same issue as the rest of us and you need to troubleshoot with people having your problem.

Edited December 1, 2011 by Drakhaoul

[Aethgar]

I've only just starting having this problem since the patch. I run with a Vista Home Premium setup, 32 bit. Acer Aspire M5620 Intel Core 2 quad CPU 3.00 GB RAM. My video card is a NVidia GTS N250.

Older machine but after some car trouble, the money I intended to spend on a new system got used so I get to wait til the savings can permit an upgrade purely for my leisure time as opposed to work.

 

Now I played through to lvl 44 on my Khajiit, with VERY few troubles. Last week roughly, I started getting crashes intermittently - like I'd go get a drink, come back, screen's black, monitor light's idle, and no way to resume activity. Music gone. The only solution being a hard shut down.

 

Now I know my puter's old and honestly a bit shaky and wierd. I know my monitor's in need of replacement. So for a while I assumed the issue was with my hardware, not Skyrim.

 

But reading these boards and checking that yes, it ONLY happens due to Skyrim?

This makes me think.

 

I run with High res water and No more Blocky Faces for mods, and I run the game full screen. I've updated all drivers, run virus scans, CC cleaner, and today, memtest. Nothing registering on my end, and no change.

The crashes happen indoors and out, during magic cast sequences or during a dungeon crawl on my warrior.

It's a bit annoying, and only really something I started noticeing this week - post patch. It may have happened earlier, but not in such a significant way that I found the game so unstable as to make me question launching it, which is where I'm at right now.

[kwantome]

Breakthrough! (maybe)

I've been screwing around even more working on the full PC freeze issue and I believe I've found a big part of the problem!

 

In my earlier post I mentioned that I'd read somewhere that the freezes only happen, (or at least become plentiful,) after level 20. I also mentioned that in several days I played around 20-30 hours with my GPU hella-overclocked without experiencing any problems- and now skyrim almost insta-freezes my whole PC when I try to OC while playing my main characters. Although skyrim will freeze up very often for me while playing as my high level characters anyway, regardless of overclocking, the OCing seemed to speed things up.

 

SO. I overclocked my GPU like a boss, put most of skyrims settings to ultra/high and loaded up a lvl 4 orc I made last week with the intentions of stressing skyrim out to the point of crash/freeze. To my astonishment I could not make the game freeze. It got choppy as hell, I even lowered the graphics back to what I normally play at and turned on nvidias anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering, but it didnt freeze. Tried the same stuff on my high lvl characters and it was just as before: Insta-freeze.

 

So it seems the problem generally only occurs in games with characters somewhere past level 20. It must be some massive problem with how the game stores or keeps track of individual character data. I know that makes the PC freezing problem even more daunting as I doubt there's currently anything we can do about it, but maybe some of my fellow skyrim PC freeze victims will share their characters levels with us. I have a feeling we will see a consistent pattern of high level characters, whose data must be glitching the game, and we probably wont see any low level characters. (level 20 and below).

 

I'm no programmer, just a very experienced PC tinkerer so I wont be able to isolate the problem any farther. Hopefully some of you forum dwellers know who to take this information to.

 

Another PS: Drakkaoul I know this is a "freeze" post but It's clearly the same issue as the original poster except my screen doesn't go black. Skyrim freezes, audio hangs for a few seconds and the PC becomes unresponsive. I imagine whether your screen goes black, freezes or loses its signal its just our GPUs different reactions to the same PC lockup problem.

 

 

Update: Been doing more running around trying to force a freeze/shutdown with that low level orc. Used the console to make him lvl 30. Still cannot get the game to crash.

 

So it isn't the high level that brings on the freeze-crashes, it's some accomplishment, quest or even an item that a higher level character would have done or acquired.

Edited December 2, 2011 by kwantome

[Aethgar]

Would mods have anything to do with it either? I have a lvl 14 Redguard, a lvl 12 Imperial, and my 44 Khajiit, for the poster above theorizing on level and savegame data causing this - trying one runthrough stealth, one using spells, one barbarian-style.

 

I run the detailed face thing and the high res water. Are there vanilla game players who're experiencing the same crash? My husband's playing it umodded on a Windows 7 laptop in the other room and while his game crashes, it doesn't do the black screen lockup mine does.

[kwantome]

Would mods have anything to do with it either? I have a lvl 14 Redguard, a lvl 12 Imperial, and my 44 Khajiit, for the poster above theorizing on level and savegame data causing this - trying one runthrough stealth, one using spells, one barbarian-style.

 

I run the detailed face thing and the high res water. Are there vanilla game players who're experiencing the same crash? My husband's playing it umodded on a Windows 7 laptop in the other room and while his game crashes, it doesn't do the black screen lockup mine does.

 

 

Does your husband have a high level character and is he very far in the game?

Ive tried both modded, (face fix, killable kids, stronger dead thrall,) and vanilla with the same results. As I said in my post I couldnt force the blackscreen/freeze with the orc even after using the console to level up whereas on my level 56 the freeze/bs is inevitable. So it could be an issue with having a particular item or completing a particular quest. Does skyrim 'freeze' when you play either of your two lower level characters or just the khajiit?

Also I believe you posted earlier that you played up to level 44 with no problems. Do you remember the last few things you did, quest-wise before you started experiencing the freezes?

Edited December 2, 2011 by kwantome

[Aethgar]

I began experiencing the freezes when I went back and started playing my low level characters specifically. My redguard and Imperial are both crash-constant. As for the Khajiit, the last few things I did with her were to tinker with ways to force a marriage with a male Khajiit, with no luck. <.< Prior to my unsuccessful and unsaved attempts to console up some Nords or some Khajiit, I completed the main quest, and befriended the Khajiit follower NPC. On the Imperial, I got him vampired, and the redguard got werewolfed (I couldn't make myself werewolf a cat person >.<), and then it started crashing as of early this week that I noticed.

 

My husband's Argonian is lvl 32, and he's finished the main quest, and the Winterhold Mages' quests, and not much else.

 

Interestingly, I went in and deleted a bunch of old games from the Khajiit, and managed to play for almost 30 min on the Redguard before I black screened again.

[Coyote1023]

I've been following this thread since I first got the problem, which was immediately after killing the very first dragon. My character is only level 8 and I get hard crashes quite often. There are very few times that I can play normally without crashing. One of the most common causes of my hard crashing was opening the world map. I fixed this by installing the mod that was mentioned earlier for the map view. That seemed to fix that problem, but I still get hard crashes at random intervals. I have played the game vanilla at low levels with crashes. It also crashes when running the 4 GB mod or the map mod.

 

My system specs:

 

Windows 7

8 GB RAM

XFX Radeon 6950 1GB

Intel i5 2500k

 

I have tried to talk to Bethesda's tech support but nothing they suggested helped and now they've just flat out stopped answering me. I'm rather frustrated as I have had this problem since I bought the game and am currently working on trying it on Ubuntu.

 

Just thought I should post to add to the list of people. Also it kind of ruins your "long play through" theory.