Hello

I have been struggling with a freezing problem with this game for some months now.
What happens is that anywhere between 10 mins, to even 5 hours of gameplay i get a frozen screen, and the background music is still playing.
When this happens skyrim doesn't respond, and i have to CTR-ALT-Del it closed.
I have noticed that this often happens when i am outside in the open, and not inside a cave or a house.

The game runs like butter otherwise, its stable on 60 fps (my screens refresh rate) and i have everything on max and ultra.


My specs:


Intel core i7-3820 3,80 GHz (a bit overclocked)

8 Gb DDR3 RAM

Geforce GTX 690

900W PSU

Asus Rampage IV Extreme motherboard

Windows 7 - 64 bit


Have checked my temps on CPU and GPU, and they are nowhere near dangerzone when i play. And since skyrim sometimes freeze after the first 10 mins of gameplay, then i am sure that this is not the problem.
I have the newest offical graphic driver (no beta), and directx and so forth. installed.

I do not have any problems on any other game than this one - I do not own Dawnguard yet.


Here is what I have tried so far:

-Set shadow to high, then medium then low, no change.

-I use headphones and tried the "sound fix" with them where I turn the sound quality down to 16 bit 44khz with my headphones.

-Also tried using my stereo speakers with no luck, and also tried stereo with "sound fix" where I went down to 24 bit 48khz.

-Unstalled every mod (only used 5 from steam workshop, no nexus) with clean install and download of the game. Only mods on was "High-res texture pack" from steam.

-Tried verify the integrity of the game on steam.

-Tried "Skyrim Crash prevention and FPS booster mod" from steam workshop, didn't solve it.

-Tried deleting the SkyrimPrefs.ini and Skyrim.ini file.


Currently trying "Unofficial Skyrim Patch" from steam workshop to see if that changes anything.

I am in a completely loss about this problem, i can still play fine, but its anoying to crash randomly, so i spam quicksave all the time.

Does any of you guys have any idea or suggesting to my problem that I could try out?


/BuGBlast

I believe I am going through some of the same issues, I don't have a setup to anything close to what you have, but this has been going on for a couple weeks now, Once I I get a freeze or a crash its like I'm prone to more freezes and crashes and then I start removing mods and its like it doesn't help.

The only thing to do is like you said bring up the task manager and end the task/process, It happens to me nearly everytime I load up a save and play and then I really cant advance from that point.

I have unistalled Skyrim and Steam, I started a fresh new save, reinstalled my mods and it worked for a little while but then like I said I hit that wall of freezes/crashes and then I'm screwed again.

I am currrently on my third attempt at a fresh save and I am at the very beginning running through helgen and run around one corner of a building and it crashes immediately everytime, as you can imagine this is very annoying


What this also tells me is that it might not be the PC, as you have a very high end PC and your experiencing the same as me at low-end

A highend pc doesn't rule out unstable clock speeds malfunctioning ram or other hardware issues. Its possible your Overclock is just unstable enough to cause random bs freezes. It could be a stick of ram has a bad point that if any data is written to it it will cause the program to go crash. This is by no means absolute but just one more thing to consider.

Skyrim is a very CPU driven game so you might look into what your settings are, also I don't know what drivers the 690 has but you might want to look into the 304 beta's if they are available.

Thank you both for your input.

I have ran memtest, and other programs to insure that my RAMs is good. As said i have plenty other very new games i can run 100% stable on highest settings without problems.

Also tried to reset all settings in bios back to default - no overclock anymore.

But it still seems to happen, I got the exact same problem as abice described, tho i play on the same saved file for about 70 hours now - i do not start over when it happens.

Guess i could try the beta driver, or just wait for the official release of the new driver, and try again from there.

/BuGBlast

My first character I had like 40 hours into it, I was so upset, but I really was stuck and was the only option i saw because I'm no expert at this stuff, my next character I got about 8 hours into it, it wasn't such a let down, and my third character lol I never made it through helgen, I'm on attempt number 4 right now