Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-74.38.0.152-20130401065239/@comment-3213309-20130723011948

The UESP description actually closely matches the wiki description here. I find UESP does a better job of demonstrating the underlying math that goes into each strike in the game.

My impressions of chaos damage are that each element has a 50% chance to fire, meaning that most of the time at least one element will fire and give you additional damage on top of the regular strike damage. The ammount of power stacks as it is effected by each of the three elemental destruction perks AND the enchanting perks. I created a pair of Daedric Swords that top out with over two hundred points of elemental damage possible PER ELEMENT PER STRIKE(and that doesn't include the regular strike damge which is is close to 500). It's possible a single regular strike using this enchantment could land well over 1000 points of damage in a single blow! If you add in elements over the top of chaos, i.e. frost damage plus chaos (which I didn't do, I went with absorb effects)  I'm guessing you could craft a weapon capabale of doing close to 1500 points of damage in a single blow, especially if its composed of stalhrim.