Possible Reason for Crashing?

[Dmz96]

Hi!

 

I (like many) have frequent CTD issues. I used to get them A LOT (like 1 per hour) on my old laptop. Now, however, I'm on a new desktop I built and I still see these issues. The CTD's most commonly happen out in the wild (as in not inside, I can't recall a single CTD while inside a house). For the purpose of my question, let's take silent moons camp (the camp just outside of whiterun). If I run near it (like my character is literally sprinting), I CTD. It also happens to be half unloaded and looks like a grassy patch of mountain, with only a wall visible. If I slowly walk up to it, however, I can see individual parts of the camp render and eventually I can walk into the camp, run, kill - whatever. The same thing happened with the western watch tower, but it didn't have any render issues, it looked just fine.

 

So I thought it was my mods, I used programs like Boss to order my mods and GPU-Z to check vRam usage, which didn't pass 1700mb. I reinstalled skyrim along with my mods and that didn't fix it. Did a new save (several) and still no luck. I've tried defragging with Defraggler but it continuously reported my HDD was fragmented w/ about 15% of it "wrong." I then tried IOBit Smart Defrag, which defrags at a very fast rate (seems fishy). And yes, I've restarted my computer several times (I turn it off at night).

 

I have a lot of mods installed, 99% of which come from the STEP project, I did all the tweaks mentioned in that guide too, which included halving render distance of everything but grass.

 

To get to my question already: Am I CTDing because the textures can't load quick enough? How can I fix this? Would an SSD help (I plan on getting one soon, so I can just tough it out until then)? Should I up the render distance? I'm not sure if a SSD would help because I thought all textures were loaded into the vRam, but I could be wrong. If it helps, here are relevant parts from my build:

 

(GPU) EVGA FTW Sig2 w/ default clock speed (Gpu-z reports it hitting 1189 mghz) & 2gb of GDDR5 vRam

(CPU) Intel Core i5 3570k clocked @ 4.7 Ghz (Runs very stable)

(HDD) Western Digital Caviar Blue @ 7200 rpm

(RAM) Samsung 8GB of DDR3-1600 ram

[Dmz96]

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