System going to sleep in Skyrim then becoming unresponsive.

I know this sounds like a 3rd party problem, but stay with me for a minute.
So I'm playing Skyrim Special Edition and it runs fine with no crashing or other problems. Then I get a phone call that's going to take a few minutes so I pause the game typically by hitting escape, turn off the computer monitor and take the phone call. I come back 10 minutes later, turn the monitor back on, and it flashes like the computer is sleeping. Doesn't matter what I do, 3-finger solute, move mouse, hit power button on keyboard, alt+tab, etc. nothing works to get the PC out of sleep. Sometimes I've left the game running and I can hear characters walk by and talk over the speakers so I know the game is still working, but the graphics card I guess has gone to sleep. The only way for it to startup is to hit the hard reset.

<<Troubleshooting>>
1. Tried several drivers from AMD, all have the same problem.
2. Haven't noticed it on other games, however the 2nd message comes up, further on that in a second.
3. If I go away for a 5 or less minutes usually there's a message on screen, "Windows needs to shutdown this program to clear up memory." even though the task manager shows only 22% total memory utilization.
4. Switching to a VGA D-SUB cable and the problem disappears, which I can only assume that via HDMI the monitor is telling Windows that no one's looking and go to sleep, like it's a laptop. I can't run it via DSUB because LG only supports 30 HZ refresh with that connector. What I'm looking for is a way to supress these settings to ignore the monitor being turned off without exiting the game and restarting everytime I walk away.
5. My monitor is set to turn off after 10 minutes of inactivity, however if I leave the monitor on, and the game running it'll never turn off. Turn the monitor off, and it's like Windows overrides the game despite being full screen, something that generally never happened before W10.

Ok, so I turned off the PCI-Express setting you mentioned and tried again. This time the game had locked up properly and I was back at a stock Windows background with no icons. The task manager showed Skyrim still running but clicking on it or alt+tab into it didn't do anything. Then I forced it to close with the task manager and BSOD.
Attachment 113417

Boris,

Sorry for the delay. I changed to a new graphics card over the last two weeks and did some more troubleshooting to identify the problem. The problem is isolated to Skyrim and Fallout 4 (probably because they both use the same engine). Other games don't see to be affected.

The problem seems to be that where most games run full screen the sleep in Windows doesn't happen, similar to watching a movie and it won't go to sleep as long as it's playing. However Windows fails to recognize that these two games are full screen and running and should suspend sleep. Thus while a work around is to disable sleep for everything, and re-enable when done playing, then off and on until I go bizerk, I'd like to find a way to suppress the sleep functionality while a program is running.

Ztruker said:

Sleep is really not necessary for a Desktop system. Why not just leave it off and use the screensaver settings to turn off the display after a certain length of time?

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Under further investigation and some other computers I've found that it's not trying to sleep, it's just trying to turn off the monitor, which it does. However Windows doesn't seem to reinitialize the graphics card if a full-screen app is running, at least in the case of Bethesda and some EA titles. The clue came once when I just happened to come back just as it turned off the screen (I had already disabled sleep, but not "turn of display". I moved the mouse and the screen started stuttering, blinking between being on and a black screen. I did the 3-finger solute and as long as I had the task manager on top I could see the game, but as soon as I'd click on the Skyrim the screen would turn off. I've also confirmed this on my laptop with a Geforce 940 and Windows 10.