Skyrim complete PC crashes

[Dova13]

I know this might be irrelevant, but when skyrim black-screen crashes, sound continues then loops. After that my laptop makes a "click" sound. And once I turn it off, then back on, windows crash report thing indicates the problem as "blue screen". Since when black screen crash is bluescreen?

[Tranderas]

To recap, here's my relevant system specs:

Intel i7-2600k quad core @ 3.4 GHz (no OC)

2x XFX Radeon HD 6950 2gb video cards, in Crossfire mode (driver Catalyst v11.11b)

8 GB RAM

Windows 7 Home Premium

 

I wrote to AMD since tests done by others in this thread suggest that the problem may be a video memory issue. This is the text of their response:

 

Response and Service Request History:

 

We apologize for any inconvenience and will gladly investigate and assist you with this issue. A few hours ago the newest performance driver has been released - AMD Catalyst Performance Driver version 11.11c - please check if this version will resolve the problem described.

 

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Catalyst1111cperformance.aspx

My next recommendation is to install and use the free software Game Booster.

 

Game Booster 3 will allow you to tweak your system for top PC performance. By temporarily shutting background processes and unnecessary Windows services, cleaning RAM, and intensifying processor performance, Game Booster 3 concentrates every little system resource for gaming only. With an intuitive interface you can switch between gaming mode and normal mode..

 

Game Booster's interface provides a list of 24 noncritical processes that can be shut down during gaming. Check boxes allow users to select specific processes. You can temporarily disable all of the listed processes, and the program will quickly start them again when you switch back to normal mode. In addition to disabling unnecessary system processes, Game Booster offers a game defragmenter that specifically defragments the game directories, allowing a given game to start and run more quickly. You will notice a significant difference in game performance when using gaming mode.

 

Game Booster is free. It installs and uninstalls without issues. It can be downloaded from the following website .

 

http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html

 

If this step doesn’t resolve the issue, please let us know and we will gladly investigate further.

 

 

 

 

 

In order to update this service request, please respond, leaving the service request reference intact.

 

Best regards,

 

AMD Global Customer Care

 

By the way, following the above fixes (running the game through Skyrim4gb and installing both atiumdag and the TES Skyrim patch Falthos mentioned), and I have been running the game for three hours with no crashes (where previously it would drop my PC in no more than 30 minutes). I haven't downloaded catalyst 11.11c yet. Although the game has been relatively stable, at ultra-high graphics it sometimes slows down when there's a lot of particle effects, such as while fighting wisps and the Wispmother. I'm going through Labyrinthia right now, if I crash I will report it.

Edited December 2, 2011 by Tranderas

[philjwill]

The ATI dll fix just caused insta-crashing on my PC, I'm running the 4870 though, and I think my GPU fan might just be dying

[Dova13]

The ATI dll fix just caused insta-crashing on my PC, I'm running the 4870 though, and I think my GPU fan might just be dying

I'm running 4670 and there was no insta-crash. I actually got to derp around in Whiterun.

[modtheworld]

Hi everyone.

This problem sounds more like a paging file/cache issue. so here is my troubleshoot on the subject.Check to see what your OS pagingfile is set to it should always be set to double the amount of ram that is installed in your system.IT is also known as virtual memory,where your cache writes to temporarily when your RAM becomes to full.So when your playing games like skyrim and it crashes its probably from your cache overloading and not haveing enough allocated virtual memory to hold the overflow, so if you double the size like mentioned above and do one other step it should fix this for everyone.the higher the game settings the more cache you use ultimately .So if your useing the 4gb large address aware patch you deffinitly want to do this.But the last step is to change bUseHardDriveCache=0 to bUseHardDriveCache=1 so that it has plenty of room to work with.This should help out a lot and stop continual crashes.

 

P.S the second step is changed in the Skyrim.ini file

 

 

 

 

modtheworld

[Cp6uH]

I found what seems to be a fix for this tedious full system crash when visiting the bethesda forum post mentioned a few pages ago on this thread (the compilation of everything we have tried). I'll post what I found on the thread here to make things easier.

 

Note: I don't think that this will work for Nvidia users, only ATI.

 

--------------------

 

Download atiumdag.dll from http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ICEDIU66

See the link at this forum post

http://www.overclock...0#post_15656590

 

 

Open folder

steam > steamapps > common > skyrim

 

Drag atimgpud.dll into the steam folder. (This is to just get it out of the skyrim folder without losing the file in case this does not work.)

 

Place atiumdag.dll in the skyrim folder (steam > steamapps > common > skyrim)

 

--------------------

 

This has fixed the full system crash when opening my map as well as the random crashes that we have all suffered dearly. I hope that this helps everyone else. I'll post back if I run into any issues using this "fix".

 

 

Haven't crashed at all so far after putting this on. :dance:

 

 

 

This one worked for me too.... cheers mate!

[philjwill]

Yeah, my GPU fan has crapped out on me now, on top of all the dastardly black screen issues from before..

 

That card was the only part I was going to keep when I upgraded my PC in december too...

[kwantome]

Ok so I've been experimenting again to isolate the cause of these freezes/black screens.

 

I'm sure you're all sick of hearing about my orc character, the one who doesn't freeze whilst my other characters all freeze/force my PC to shutdown randomly. So last night I did a few of the starting quests, gained a level or two and then relayed my freezelessness and exact quests to this forum. Today that orc character finally gave me the lockup. This was after completing the first dragon quest and receiving a few random quests, (redguard woman one, golden claw, that's basically it).

This was the character that I simply could not get to freeze in hours of playing before I had done any of the main quest. So I reloaded the original old save with the orc character and it's just like before: It simply will not cause the issue.

I know this doesn't help the people who are experiencing this game ruining freeze in the initial escape from Helgen. I just figured that I should post this development to go with the other info I've provided.

 

It really seems that quests could have something to do with it since that was the only difference between my two orc saves. Unforunately it was the main quest, so here's hoping bethesda devs have noticed this issue and are working on it.

 

Have to thank everyone that humored me with making new characters only to find that their lockups can happen even in the intro mission. We'll get through this eventually :P

Edited December 2, 2011 by kwantome

[paxlop]

I ALMOST FIXED IT :-)

 

nvidia SLI, core i7, win 7 64 bit - i had all the problems in above, windows was crashing even not launching skyrim sometimes, i am IT specialist and i did everything for 2 days, replacing hardware, mem tests, deinstaling directx in registry bla bla

nothing helped, but than i reinstalled my audio drivers (which were by the way working fine) and problem solved. I have 37 lvl character. now i can finally play for an hour before i get hard crash again. There might be some memmory leaks, since i have 12 GB i can run from 30 to 60 min, than crash. The problem is definitelly nvidia + skyrim. It is not hardware issue.

Edited December 3, 2011 by paxlop

[Falthos]

Possible fix for Ati Users:

 

I found what seems to be a fix for this tedious full system crash when visiting the bethesda forum post mentioned a few pages ago on this thread (the compilation of everything we have tried). I'll post what I found on the thread here to make things easier.

 

Note: I don't think that this will work for Nvidia users, only ATI.

 

--------------------

 

Download atiumdag.dll from http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ICEDIU66

See the link at this forum post

http://www.overclock...0#post_15656590

 

 

Open folder

steam > steamapps > common > skyrim

 

Drag atimgpud.dll into the steam folder. (This is to just get it out of the skyrim folder without losing the file in case this does not work.)

 

Place atiumdag.dll in the skyrim folder (steam > steamapps > common > skyrim)

 

--------------------

 

This has fixed the full system crash when opening my map as well as the random crashes that we have all suffered dearly. I hope that this helps everyone else. I'll post back if I run into any issues using this "fix".

 

I have tried this after coming home from work, and it seems to work for me (Got the problem 100+ hours into the game when opening/using the map). But keep in mind that I did not have time for more extensive testing. Others are reporting problems with this fix (low fps), for some it works. Worth a try in my opinion.

 

Here's my rig:

 

Intel Core 2 Quad 2,4 GHz

Win 7 Pro x64

6GB RAM

2GB AMD Radeon 6970 with 11.9 drivers (11.11b didn't work either)

OCZ Vertex 3 SSD 120 GB

 

Don't wanna cheer too soon, but thanks Falthos for posting this!

 

Glad to hear we have more success with this! I'll post my setup so that we can compare rigs and see if its specific ATI cards that this fix works on.

 

Win 7 Ultimate x64

Phenom 2 Deneb 3.2Ghz

4 GB DDR2 800 RAM

HIS ICE-Q TURBO 6870 with latest catalyst

750 GB 72000 RPM Sata HD

750W Corsair PSU