Tell us your specs first, including:

RAM
Type Of Processer
Type of Graphics Card
Custom PC or Store-Bought PC
If Store-Bought PC, What Model
Motherboard

Because I've had this problem before with one of my (families) earlier computers.

The motherboard had some problems, and the fan ports had gone out, including the graphics card one, and the computer overheated when playing Skyrim, and crashed.

Just tell us your specs, and are you willing to open you pc and look at it while it turns on? This way you can see if any of the fans aren't spinning properly, or not at all.

It also might just be dust.

But anyways...

Ok, it's not your specs (except your processer could be better, becuase did you know most 3-core processers are actually 4-core with one of them locked, but whatever, not relevant).

So the next step, is because I'm assuming you're tech savy (a custom PC), next step is to turn off you computer. While leaving everything plugged in, open it up. (Make sure it's on it's side. Have a flashlight or something. Illuminate it.)

Turn it on.

See if all the fans are OK.

If any of them are not working, the motherboard is blown out at those ports.

Normally, you would be screwed, but they have adapter for fans getting power from the Power Supply.

Also, make sure there is no dust. Clean it out with a vacume or if you have that fancy pressurized air stuff.

If you fans are working.... gimme a second. I need to check something out first and I'll edit my post.

If the fans are or aren't working, get AMD overdrive, open it up, start playing skyrim. Check the tempature.

Does it overheat?

I suggest you format your HDD and reinstall windows.

as Kemerd said, check the fans are fine.
Make sure all the vents are not clogged up with dust as that reduces the air intake.
If the issue keeps happening and it seems to be a temperature issue then you may want to look into getting a better cooling system, liquid coolers are best but they can be very expensive, copper pipe heat sinks should work, ones like this: overclockers.co.uk/showproduct…ZA&groupid=701&catid=2330
and this overclockers.co.uk/showproduct…TR&groupid=701&catid=2330
will get the job done well for your cpu
More case fans can help aswell but that depends if there is room for any more in your case and if your power supply can power them

1-does it show a blue screen for a fraction of second?
2- i think 550Ti at 51 or 52 is normal.maybe your CPU over heats?which you can check in bios PC health Status to see the fans RPM (round per minute or speed if you prefer)CPU temp and system Temp.if your Cpu gets any higher than 60 it's over heating a bit but to make it crash it should get to 70 (this is without overclocking.if you have overclocked it then it's a different story)
3-if your problem has occurred just recently after installing or updating the Nvidia Driver know it's the driver.the new driver which is 3.20.1 i think,has a lot of problems and there have been reports of games repeatedly crash such as Battlefield 3 or Far Cry 3 or Assassin's Creed.if this is the case uninstall the driver and try version 3.14 or lower...

Seeing as this hasn't been suggested this could be a simple issue of updating your graphics card driver? Try upgrading your card to the latest it can support and try run the games you play again to see if they fix anything from the Nvidia webpage.
(nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us)
If not then proceed with either cleaning out your PC for dust as some people have mentioned.

Buy a can of compressed air for like $5, open your PC and clean it out. It'll be easier to see if there are any issues that way. It could be that you need to format your hard drive, it could be a busted connection, it could be a driver issue.
But first off, update your graphics driver and do a clean on the inside of your rig, it may well fix it and won't take too much time/money.

NuMetalWolf wrote:

Slater wrote:

Seeing as this hasn't been suggested this could be a simple issue of updating your graphics card driver? Try upgrading your card to the latest it can support and try run the games you play again to see if they fix anything from the Nvidia webpage.
(nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us)
If not then proceed with either cleaning out your PC for dust as some people have mentioned.

Hey dude, what can you tell me about Geforce R320 driver?

From what i've read about the latest 320.18 driver from Nvidia is that its a bad one. You should be cautious when updating to it simply because there have been a few cases where some people's graphics card/GPU's have died because of it. In less serious cases games start to have some major issues where there's just a whole tonne of artifacts and graphical issues. If you want to take the risk for some better performance in games then go right ahead, but be wary of the risk the latest driver has.

I'm not sure why Nvidia released this driver when there's such a clear problem with it, they should really take it down and work out its problems so that other's don't have their graphics card damaged by it.

NuMetalWolf wrote:

Slater wrote:

NuMetalWolf wrote:

Slater wrote:

Seeing as this hasn't been suggested this could be a simple issue of updating your graphics card driver? Try upgrading your card to the latest it can support and try run the games you play again to see if they fix anything from the Nvidia webpage.
(nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us)
If not then proceed with either cleaning out your PC for dust as some people have mentioned.

Hey dude, what can you tell me about Geforce R320 driver?

From what i've read about the latest 320.18 driver from Nvidia is that its a bad one. You should be cautious when updating to it simply because there have been a few cases where some people's graphics card/GPU's have died because of it. In less serious cases games start to have some major issues where there's just a whole tonne of artifacts and graphical issues. If you want to take the risk for some better performance in games then go right ahead, but be wary of the risk the latest driver has.

I'm not sure why Nvidia released this driver when there's such a clear problem with it, they should really take it down and work out its problems so that other's don't have their graphics card damaged by it.

Alright.... So, do you have any good one in mind you think is worth recommending? I would appreciate if you did..

The 314.22 driver before the 320.18 driver is a good safe one to use, assuming your graphics card can support it. If you already have it then just stick with that till the next driver update comes about and when it does, just check up on it before making the jump to make sure its not another problem driver like the 320.18.

OK this is fairly simple to do but i'll try to make it as easy to understand as possible, hence why this post will be very long.

Well before you start downgrading just make sure you're not already on the driver version 314.22. To do that just right click on the desktop, open the Nvidia Control Panel and then at the top go into Help>System Information. A window should pop up and on the "Display" tab just check the driver version, if it says 314.22 then you should just leave the driver where it is.

If it is 320.18 then you can proceed with trying to roll back your driver to the previous version and to do that you will need to make sure you have a copy of the 314.22 driver installer to use which you can get here by just searching for it (nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx).

In case your driver version is lower than 314.22 then just run the installer you have just downloaded and it will update your driver to 314.22, then try running the games you were playing to see if the issues still persist. If they don't then congratulations! If not then at least you got some optimisations for other games with that driver.

Anyways if you're already on 320.18 and want to downgrade, make sure the driver installation file is saved somewhere you remember like the desktop and then restart the computer and boot up into safe mode (usually done by mashing the F8 button till a list of options come up and then you choose safe mode, don't worry if things look wrong when in this mode, that's normal). Once in safe mode go to Start>Control Panel> Device Manager.

Once in device manager, navigate down to "Display adaptors" and open that up and you should find your GTX 550 Ti listed there. Right click on it and choose Uninstall then just follow the prompts to uninstall. It may require a restart for the changes to take place so do that, but when you restart try to reboot back into safe mode.

Once back in safe mode just simply run the 314.22 driver installation file and follow the prompts, once done just reboot the computer back into windows like normal (not in safe mode anymore) and just check in the control panel that the driver version is indeed 314.22. If it is then it worked, so just go ahead and try out your games. Hopefully that helps solve your problem!

after your system crashes and restarts touch around the heat sink and back of the graphic card.if it's too hot try changing the thermal paste for both your graphic card and CPU.if that didn't work either.it's your hard drive...