I just want to share the solution I found when experiencing CTD around certain outside areas. In my case, I started getting CTD in Dragon Bridge after updating my GTX 680 to Nvidia 320.49 driver. Reverting back to 314.22 made the problem go away but I still would get random CTD here and there while moving about. Something is not right here and I would like to use the latest drivers so I started looking for hardware issues.

I used Skyrim Performance Monitor and noticed right away that when I'm in Dragon Bridge the GPU load goes way up. The CTD occurred when my GPU temperature is in the high 70's degree C.

I fixed this problem by downloading EVGA Precision X application and setup a fan profile for the GTX 680. I also went into the BIOS and made sure that the speed control for my chassis fans are setup to handle heat load that are greater than standard (Turbo!). The downside is the system is much louder now but the upside is I no longer have CTD in Dragon Bridge or anywhere else. after hours of play. I prefer to play with my noise cancellation headphones on so the noise is not a problem anyway.

You should allllllllways have a fan profile setup for the 600 series cards, simply because when the thermal clock reaches 70c kepler will automatically downclock your GPU until it can maintain below that. It's not typical that you'll crash due to 70c though because that's actually very managable...these GPUs can run all the way up to like 85 safely, 90 is pretty much the threshold. You may be running out of vram or physical ram, I'd suggest optimizing your texture mods and removing some script intensive mods.

The reason why you crash when you hit 70c is because it's under extreme pressure either from scripting or texture overload. Both running out of physical ram from script intensive mods, and running out of video ram from texture intensive mods can crash or freeze your game. Having it crash at 70c was merely a coincidence or it's because kepler downclocked your GPU, thus taking away the sufficient power necessary to run all of the mods you intended to run. Never let it reach 70c, make sure the last point on your fan curve is max fan speed at 69c.