Help with Processors

[kennymcg1995]

I've been having issues with Skyrim lately. First, it was forcing me to pretty much have all my settings at low, with medium textures. I had no idea why, because my system should easily be able to run the game. Turns out, since I had reinstalled it recently, Steam decided to also install the Hi Res Texture Pack for no reason whatsoever. I quickly got rid of that, and now the game will at least start with High settings. It seemed to run extremely well and it looked great, but then it just crashed out of nowhere in Whiterun. I installed FRAPS, and sure enough, I get a solid 50fps everywhere in Whiterun. I can run around and do whatever. I can fast travel away from Whiterun, I can (usually) fast travel back as well. But there are some things, mainly waiting for more than 4 or 5 hours or leaving/entering cells through doors, that crash. No fps drop at all, no performance drop, just crash to the desktop with no warning or message.

 

All the crashes go away if I drop my settings down to, say, Medium, but it looks terrible, and I shouldn't have to run this game with outrageously low settings compared to everything else. My only theory right now is that this is caused by my processor. I'm going to buy myself a Christmas present (AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition @3.4 GHz) that I hope will eliminate my issues.

 

Oh, and if it matters, it was raining in Whiterun when I was testing this. For some reason the game would crash specifically if I waited, regardless of how long, for it to stop raining. I don't have any weather/rain-related overhaul mods at all though.

 

P.S. This doesn't have anything to do with Whiterun specifically, it has happened in other places. I just used Whiterun as an example because it's pretty heavy on performance usually.

 

Current System Specs:

 

 

nVIDIA GeForce GTX 465

AMD Athlon II X2 255 @3.1GHz

4GB RAM

BioStar A770E3

1TB Hitachi HDD

Windows 7 32-bit

 

 

Edited December 15, 2012 by kennymcg1995

[Illiad86]

Skyrim should run pretty fine on your computer...hmm. Getting the quad core would help performance a little bit though.

 

Wait, 32 bit Windows? Are you sure on that? If so, only 3GB of that 4GB RAM will be used.

 

Your card is similar to mine, a little slower on the core clock though. I can play the game on Ultra with 4xAA, 16xAF, and the official texture pack...great framerates all around. I have a 4.0GHz quad core though...but any dual or quad over 3GHz should be able to run the game smoothly.

 

What other mods are you using? What patch are you using? Skyrim is still notorious for CTDs. I'd get the latest patch and the latest UOP to see if anything changes.

 

Do you have to do this with other games or is it Skyrim specifically?

[kennymcg1995]

Yeah, definitely 32-bit Windows.

 

I'm on whatever Steam's latest version is, and I'm currently using the Unofficial Patch. I've got rid of the majority of my mods awhile ago. Right now I pretty much have UFO, Realistic Lighting with Customization, and some armor/weapon mods. No ENBs and no other graphical or overhaul mods. Skyrim is the only game I've been having issues with. I can run both Battlefield 3 and Crysis 2 at a steady 30-40fps. I can run The Witcher 2 with pretty decent settings and very little, if any, lag. My main concern is the complete lack of warning when it crashes. There's a nice, solid "45" in yellow block letters in the corner of my screen, everything's working great, then BOOM- crash to desktop.

 

Actually, there's a weird thing going on with my main character right now on top of all of this. Sometimes when I go to load a save, the loading screen and everything will finish just fine, but the screen will be completely yellow. It looks like yellow highlighter with my compass overlayed on top of it. It'll do this for a good 10-15 seconds, and fraps will show about 2fps. Then everything will pop in fraps jumps up to 45-50fps and everything is fine. Sometimes when it goes yellow it crashes, others it makes it through and I can play. When I Googled it I got a bunch of results about textures flashing yellow or whatever, but that isn't what this is. There are no meshes, nothing. The screen is solid yellow, and has just my compass overlayed on top.

 

I'm getting the sinking suspicion that the yellow thing is save corruption on my main character, and that may also be what is causing the crashes. I'll try and test it on a different character and see if it still crashes.

[Erik005]

A phenom 2 quadcore would improve overall improvement. I wouldn't buy one new though, a second hand one would be better and cheaper.

 

Maybe even a phenom x6

Edited December 15, 2012 by Erik005

[FMod]

Haven't you asked largely the same in this thread before?

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/856043-running-ultra-skyrim/

 

Biostar A770 is not really a high-end motherboard though. AMD's high-end chipsets are 900 series, 700 series (770) is mainstream. This motherboard only has 3+1 phase power, without heatsinks on VRM, so an overclocked Phenom II X6 would be too much. But at least it has 4 memory slots.

 

Upgrading to Phenom II X4 will be a good improvement. You'll want to overclock it as well. It will help somewhat in Skyrim, and greatly elsewhere.

Consider adding some RAM if you have money left to spare. Even just one 4GB module, they are $18 a piece. It will not make a revolution, but it will help. You can add another identical module later. With 8+ GB of RAM you can run a disk caching program that will improve disk performance without the expense of SSD.

 

With these changes you'll have what still amounts to a yesterday's system, but decent enough to last you at least until PS4 and Xbox720 come out and probably a year after.

Edited December 16, 2012 by FMod