Hello everyone,

This is my first time posting on these forums so I apologize if there's a separate tech support area I should be posting in, I didn't see one when looking.

I have a really annoying problem which has persisted for almost a year now (since when I first installed Skyrim). Basically I'll be playing and then suddenly my screen will just go black for a few seconds and then my computer reboots. It does not go through the shutdown phase first, it simply powers on as if it had already been shut down.

As far as I can tell there is absolutely nothing that triggers it, it's completely random. I've played for 6 hours straight and never had it Black-Screen on me, similarly I've also had it Black-Screen 3 times in less than 10 minutes. Sometimes it happens when I open the map, sometimes it's when I fire an arrow/swing a sword, sometimes it's when I am simply moving - completely random. I've googled the issue and apparently lots of other people are having the same problem although I haven't found the cause or solution.

I was hopping someone here might be able to help me resolve this [incredibly annoying] issue.

Relevant troubleshooting information:
-Skyrim is the ONLY game where I have this problem
-My computer is capable of running many games on maximum settings (Guild Wars 2, League of Legends, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3)
-I have had programs running in the background which monitor my CPU's heat levels while playing skyrim - they are completely normal, nowhere near danger levels.
-I am not running any mods


-My computer specs:
Phenom II X4 955(3.2GHz)
8GB DDR3 1TB HDD Capacity
AMD Radeon HD 6870 (1 GB)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit





If anyone has any knowledge about how to go about fixing this issue I would be extremely grateful.

ever try a fresh reinstall? tried defragmenting your hard drive? also tried steams function to verify integrity of game cache?

Also, are your system drivers up to date (graphics card and chipset in particular) did you try custom INI settings? did you google to see if ur the only one having this issue?

You can try updating your bios as a last resort. (be very careful with this, and read the manual if u do this)

None of the games you mentioned are graphically intensive, but then again neither is skyrim.

Does it happen if you run oblivion? if so its probably a graphics card issue about something thats in these games, but not in the other games you play i guess (basically a defective gpu) i've had weird stuff like that happen to me.

This is extremely (and i mean extremely) strange.

Have you tried disabling graphical options in the game? (shadows, radial blur, low res textures, disable object detail fade, view distance, etc) and seen if it keeps doing that?

also, you should try since its not overheating, to monitor the load on the cpu and gpu, and memory usage aswell, possibly hard drive aswell. and try to see what spikes upon crashing in some logged results.

The above is just the stuff i would start with to try to get to the bottom of this strange issue... if none of it'd work i'd try to find a way that makes the game crash the computer 100%. then try replacing the grpahic gpu, card with another one and see if it'll crash again, if it doesn't your graphics card would be somehow defective, and you'd have to prove to the guys that have it warrantied that its the gpu by showing them the crash, then making them switch gpus and show them how it doesn't crash.

Lastly, it might be that your power supply is getting old or can't handle high wattage output, even if i doubt it.

maybe your computer is just haunted

Edit: i saw another forum thread with this exact same issue, upon opening the map, clearly an incompatibility between the new ATI Driver and the game. actually when i updated to the new ati driver on my laptop, it went nuts and the screen started blinking red, green, blue, black, white, black with white stripes horizontally then black with white strypes vertically, on constant loop, i eventually gave up, went to safe mode, completely uninstalled the drivers and the card, and installed the beta driver, you can try the ati beta driver, it may fix ur problem.

My drivers are all up to date and I defrag regularly. I have re-installed Skyrim twice since I first bought the game. I have not played with BIOS settings at all.

Unfortunately I'm not a diehard TES fan, although I do plan on playing the older games someday as of now I've only ever played Skyrim so I don't know if I'd have the same issues with other games. However I have had no issues with Fallout 3 or New Vegas and they operate under a similar sandbox environment, so if it was an issue with memory and the huge map, I think I would have problems with the Fallout games as well.