Who has the most stable PC build for Skyrim, what are you using?

[dbrown9141]

I am one of the many people who seem to suffer endless crashes and problems with Skyrim. I'll start by saying that I'm not looking for tech support necessarily, but rather recommendations for a new build...but I'd take any advice I can get at this point.

 

Currently the game will not progress past the intro sequence w/o crashing. Although I have experienced about 4 hours of gameplay (previously) and that took hours (over two weeks) of digging to fix an unplayable stutter issue. I finally stumbled upon the 64hz bug fix here on Nexus, and although that just traded one problem for another it gave me the idea of using an FPS limiter (via MSI afterburner) which completely fixed the stutter. Unfortunately I was so happy from finally fixing everything and actually playing the game I decided to load a couple of mods after backing up the game. Eventually one mod to many led to a crash, which despite removing/deleting everything and installing fresh from steam I have been unable to recover from. I've tried many solutions online to no avail, too much time has been wasted.

 

 

So being that I'm at the point of no return, having upgraded my graphics card, cpu cooler, re-installed windows, re-installed Skyrim, and updated drivers and everything else imaginable. I must ask what ask what are you using to run Skyrim perfectly? I don't want to just be able to play the game, although that'd be nice. I want to know who's running the most mod's, the most eye candy, with the highest settings and still completely stable. I shouldn't need an insanely fast pc, nor do I want to throw any more money away. I want to be able to put this thing together, install the game, load up mods and start playing without a hitch. If you took obvious steps to ensuring stability that's fine. And I know your thinking that mod's could inevitably cause problems for anyone, but I can't even play the game stock.

 

Here's my current setup:

 

 

i7 920 OC'd to 3.24ghz (hyper 212 cooler)

 

Gigabyte X58A-UD3R

 

6gb Patriot Ram (triple channel)

 

Gigabyte 7870 OC edition

 

Crucial 64gb SSD

 

OCZ 700 watt psu

 

 

 

If you have any specific hardware replacements or suggestions I'd hear those as well. Or if you have reports on mod's that work together. Thanks

[dragonslayer2k12]

Do you have problems with other games crashing?

 

AMD video card drivers are notorious for crashing systems. I read somewhere that a new driver release fixed a lot of problems in general and with skyrim though.

 

That power supply you have is only 700 watts... like I said if you have any other games crashing it would be good to know why and also you are overclocking so 700 watts maybe not quite enough?

 

 

My specs

 

Gigabyte X58A-OC motherboard with latest bios

 

Intel core i7 960 cpu overclocked to 4GHZ:-)

 

12 gigs of ram 1600MHZ running at that speed triple channel

 

Crucial M4 128GB ssd drive

 

Samsung SSD Pm800 256GB for program files directories

 

Asus GTX560Ti 1024mb video card non overclocked version and 301.42 drivers

 

Cougar SX S850 power supply 850 watts.

 

Raven 2E case with sideways hard drive bays

 

Win7 64 bit

 

 

Sometimes my pc will crash while playing supreme commander forged alliance and it will crash hard with BSOD and stuttering sound but this is probably happening because I am overclocking. I have had this game crash on me like this through several video driver revisions and system reloads. Skyrim will quickly crash as black screen and then I am back and the desktop if I play for a long time for example AFK to go take care of some stuff and then come back and my system crashed. But if I play for 10 hours straight it will occasionally crash after that.

 

I haven't run the latest firmware on my m4 drive yet the one that fixes the longer than 5000 hours and corrupt drive bug because I am nowhere near 5000 hours on that drive. Planning another system reload soon and I will do it then. Also there is one beta bios for my board that does something with improving raid on the sata3 controller so I want to look into that too.

 

Ultimately though I think it has a lot to do with overclocking, if you can image your system for backup, reload it as clean system use the image later to get back to where you were, get rid of overclock and only install drivers and windows updates etc no extra programs like antivirus and office or java, nothing else except the basics and then skyrim with v1.5 and then try it vanilla for a few days then move up to v1.6 and see if it gets better or worse. If you still get small crashes where it just goes back to desktop after a long while then it will probably be ok but if you overclock again and it crashes a lot again you might have to adjust your overclock settings. I had a lot of hard crashing while trying to find the sweet spot for my cpu when overclocking. The voltage is hard to get just right but thankfully the X58 platform is a tank when it comes to overclocking! So much room to play with voltage but sandybridge is a fine edge! You can kill a sandy with just a tad too much voltage to the cpu! That and the chipset blunder by intel when sandy first came out is why I stuck with X58. Oh sure I would like to have a core i7 990x but not worth a grand to me. Anyone selling one cheap is selling an old beat down horse on its last legs lol. So I will be stuck with this 960 for a long long time. When first overclocking I had a lot of crashes until I got close to where I am now. Just a little undervolted and games like bulletstorm and mw3 would crash easily. Even windows would crash if I had too many things running for too long but once I got that voltage just right it was ok.

 

At least you don't have the latest intel system with the crappy overclock problems and the crap tin design on the cpu. Socket 2011 is overrated and cost way too much. Maybe four years from now there will be something good to move up to but sandybridge is it for now. I thought about going amd with their new cpu but it sucks compared to even x58 system lol.

 

Forgot to add that when my MCH reaches 65 degrees celcius or higher my system will crash! That only happens when room temp is high from summer time or lack of AC. I have that bg square scythe ninja something cpu cooler, the one that has only one fan but can hold four fans. I thought when building my system that it would be great for passive cooling in this case if I got a fast exhaust fan and turned the stock intake fans 180mm all the way up but no it has to have a fan on top of the cooler pulling air through it to stay cool while overclocking. I suppose it would be fine without a fan if I wasn't overclocking but I didn't build this system to run at stock speeds. That cooler looks great in my system though:-) I want some higher volume intake fans but nobody makes 180mm fans that have good performance and good lighting in fact there are only two or three choices with fans of that size. I can't afford to watercool and I don't want to deal with the mess and maintainence that comes along with it.

 

My case sits on a desk so there is no speculation about dirt in the fans or hot air building up under a desk above the pc. If you have your pc on the floor you might just try putting it on a desk or at least getting it out from under a desk so any hot air can get away from the pc and not cycle back around to the intake fans.

Edited July 1, 2012 by dragonslayer2k12

[Enatiomorph]

965 Black, 6950 2gb, 4 gb ram, 1 tb HDD. I max any game in 1080, and max Skyrim with about 42 mods.

[Psiberzerker]

My deck isn't all that special, dual core, decent graphix card, yadda^3, but it's pretty much a dedicated machine, with a connection I only use for uploading screenshots, and never accesses teh intawebz, except for Steam. The main thing is, it's my only Windows machine, so I solve Virus problems by keeping it quarentined. I'm typing this on my Linux netbook, which doesn't have to worry about Addwarez, and popups, because they're predominantly written for MS. You might want to look into cleaning it up, dumping some of the junk files, and defragging. Most windows machines run better after some house cleaning. If I had my way, I'd just Emulate on an Amiga, but I can't afford them any more since it basically became a custom only dedicated Video Toaster platform. :(

[dragonslayer2k12]

Exactly, no internet except to go here lol and not even additional browsers or anything just win7 with all updates and latest drivers etc. Use some old junker for the internet. Of course you wanna mod at some point so modding setup could be on the main pc too and the creation kit need to be installed on the same pc as the game.

 

I have two SSD drives my m4 on the sata3 controller and another on the intel sata2 controller. The m4 is windows, drivers and swap file ONLY and the other drive is for everything else. I think that if you fill an SSD drive past 50% you lose some performance from that drive. Fill it most of the way and it will be slow. So if you split up your uses between two drives you should have better system performance. Crucial M4 256gb drive is now less than $200 on the net and 128GB is $100 I think. I wish I had the cash for a 256 m4 so I could dump this samsung sata2 drive to an external setup for carrying files around. Then I would be on the sata3 controller ONLY to minimize delays between controller chips and cut down on any problems between drivers of two different controller chips.

[breakwind]

I have a n AMD Phenom 2 X4 925 on an ASUS M4A88T motherboard with 4GB of ddr 3 ram, with an ATI 5770 1Gig card, but I am still with Win XP so ram not all being used. I run medium graphics, and the only CTD's I have experienced was when I installed the Warzone mod...I put this down to cooling problems as I live in the tropics, and have a couple of fans coming this week(I live in the middle of nowhere). After I turned the graphics down a tad I have had no problems whatsoever

[Dhegonus]

can't belive some people have had so many crashes.. i have an acer aspir elaptop with an i7 core, 6 gig ram and an intel hd chipset and only crashed once or twice in 6 odd months.. i guess you can have the best pc in the world, but luck or rather bad luck, has a way of squirming it's way into things.

[Freyrgjurd]

I had crashes after putting back my "pci-e x1 X-Fi" in a "PCI-E 3.0 x16". And putting the sound over 16-bit / 44100hz. Besides that, I'm pretty stable. uGrids 9, forcing AA via inspector, with enb and SMAA injector (fanatic).

 

My rig:

 

I7 3770K

 

16Gb DDR3-1333

 

Corsair Force GT 3 120Gb SSD.

 

NVIDIA Geforce GTX 670 2Gb.

 

Creative X-Fi Titanium (pci-e)

 

OCZ ZX 1000W

 

I use those Corsair's Watercoolers pré-made. Pretty ventilated rig (cpu full at 45~50º and vga at 55º full).

Windows 7 64-bit, drivers all up to date and no sort of overclock at ALL.

I use McAfee and have no problem with compatibility.

 

But then, I'm overkilling the game without mods. With mods, including High Quality SSAO, I get ~45fps with... and 35fps at really heavy open areas. Inside dungeons is 58 locked via inspector.

No crashes even with ugrids 9. Lot of ini tweaks.

[Psiberzerker]

can't belive some people have had so many crashes.. i have an acer aspir elaptop with an i7 core, 6 gig ram and an intel hd chipset and only crashed once or twice in 6 odd months.. i guess you can have the best pc in the world, but luck or rather bad luck, has a way of squirming it's way into things.

Like I said, with Windows Machines, performace problems are often caused by Software, and blamed on hardware. Before spending a whole bunch of money on upgrades, or a new system, I'd adjust settings, clear out all the unneccessary junk, disable any popups, and defragment the hard disk. If you know how, you can also partition so that your game is quarentined away from the Adware, counter Adware, and Anti-counter-adware duking it out over your hard drive. Most of the crashes I experienced were ultimately caused by 1 program trying to convince me that my computer was infected. I finally had to System Restore, and defrag, then it never happened again, once I seperated it from Exploder. Also, I re-install skyrim after every update, that seems to make it a lot more stable, with fewer internal glitches. Don't worry, your save files are seperate, and backed up by steam, so you won't lose your progress. This allows the scripts to mesh better than retro-patching without a re-install. Edited July 1, 2012 by Psiberzerker

[dbrown9141]

can't belive some people have had so many crashes.. i have an acer aspir elaptop with an i7 core, 6 gig ram and an intel hd chipset and only crashed once or twice in 6 odd months.. i guess you can have the best pc in the world, but luck or rather bad luck, has a way of squirming it's way into things.

Like I said, with Windows Machines, performace problems are often caused by Software, and blamed on hardware. Before spending a whole bunch of money on upgrades, or a new system, I'd adjust settings, clear out all the unneccessary junk, disable any popups, and defragment the hard disk. If you know how, you can also partition so that your game is quarentined away from the Adware, counter Adware, and Anti-counter-adware duking it out over your hard drive. Most of the crashes I experienced were ultimately caused by 1 program trying to convince me that my computer was infected. I finally had to System Restore, and defrag, then it never happened again, once I seperated it from Exploder. Also, I re-install skyrim after every update, that seems to make it a lot more stable, with fewer internal glitches. Don't worry, your save files are seperate, and backed up by steam, so you won't lose your progress. This allows the scripts to mesh better than retro-patching without a re-install.

 

 

I am convinced that it is a combination of software and hardware issues. My problems began with crashes from Fallout New Vegas when I was using a different windows installation on another hard drive- also using gtx 460's in sli. I couldn't get that game to play stock either. I ended up installing windows on my smaller SSD, upgrading to a 7870, and overclocking/cooling my cpu. I was okay for a while after limiting the framerate (although I tried so many different things its possible I had something else modified), but I was getting smooth gameplay maxed out for a couple days. It's frustrating that I can't get back to that point, so I partially believe that I did have some other modification/fix that I can't remember. Problem is I don't want to experience another 30 more load screens and crashes of trial and error (half of the crashes result in a reboot).

 

 

Have you ever used the backup inside of steam for backing up games? Or do you just copy the game folder? Also I noticed that every time I reinstalled Skyrim my gamesaves were reloaded, wouldn't those be dependent on mod's that I had installed that are no longer there, thus resulting in instability?