JohnD77 :
More specifically, can a heavily modded Skyrim cause a hardware failure BSOD. I've gotten already 10 bluescreens caused by the same thing, each dump file says the same thing and somewhere it says it's a hardware failure and it only happens when I'm playing Skyrim, which I have heavily modded. I can understand the game crashing to desktop but a bluescreen? and even worse a hardware failure bluescreen? I've already ran diagnostics and stress tests on my hardware and I never get any problems except when I play Skyrim, and my system can handle it. I have:
- 8GB of RAM
- i7-4770k 3.5ghz processor
- 750w power supply
- Nvidia GTX 780 graphics card
This is a complicated question.
In general, under Windows NT variants (Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1) a program cannot cause a BSoD. The technical reason behind this isn't particularly complicated but it's not important enough to discuss at the moment. However, the system APIs that program uses may have a path to a kernel device driver; DirectX is one such example. If there's a bug somewhere in that path that causes the kernel driver to enter an inconsistent or irrecoverable state then this can cause a BSoD.
A heavily modded installation of Skyrim is unlikely to cause a BSoD unless that installation contains tweaks that are not a part of Bethesda's modding API. For example, installing additional graphics mods may expose latent bugs which can cause a BSoD. However, Microsoft, AMD, and NVidia work very hard to reduce bugs in the kernel and kernel-level device drivers, which should result in fewer BSoDs and more application crashes.