obobski

I'm planning to upgrade one of my systems as a "guinea pig" first, and then go from there for the other boxes depending on whatever that machine does (e.g. if there's a lot of compatibility problems on day 1, I'll wait for a while on the other systems). Overall I'm liking the idea of enabling DX12 and more Xbox integration though.

Something else that's a good idea for C&C:X is to download and install Command & Patch. It's basically an all-inclusive official and unofficial patch/update for the games. Read more about it here: http://www.cncnz.com/hosted-projects/command-patch/the-first-decade-unofficial-patch/ AFAIK it does relatively little for Generals, but has more significant features for Tiberian Sun and Red Alert (e.g. enables 64-bit Red Alert 2).

I tried AC4 (it came free with my Xbox One) - I wasn't significantly impressed with it as a "pirate game," but it does have pirates and pretty visuals (it plays a lot like Unity and other stealth/tactical games than anything else from the few hours I spent with it). On PC, I've heard good things about Sea Dogs, and its sequel (which is actually branded Pirates of the Carribbean, but reportedly has nothing to do with the movies); I picked up Sea Dogs from GOG during their recent sale, but I haven't gotten around to installing it yet - both of them are touted as pirate RPGs. I also vaguely remember a pirate mod or two existing for Morrowind and Oblivion (and the DLC "Thieves Den" for Oblivion too); I'm not honestly aware of anything of that nature for Skyrim. Certainly wouldn't be an entire game in that case, more of a gameplay add-on. Empire Total War also includes pirates and a carribbean theater), but you cannot play as the pirates (you can fight with them though). There's also "Sid Meier's Pirates!" which I admittedly know very little about other than its existence (I think GOG sells that one too).

It shouldn't be too hard to slide the side panel off your case and see what it says on the PSU - that'll pretty much address the question at hand. As far as the 750/750 Ti - it doesn't use much power relative to other modern cards, and is a good choice for more compact systems or if you don't have a massive power supply (or budget). It would be a good improvement over an IGP.

SKSE doesn't "extend" the address limitations inherent to IA-32/Win32 (e.g. it's not implementing PAE or anything), it just more intelligently handles Skyrim's initial memory allocation on start-up, which is primarily meant to mitigate crashes as the game runs. AFAIK it's based upon, or similar to, SSME (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50305/? - deprecated with latest builds of SKSE). As bben pointed out, a 32-bit application cannot map more than 4GB of memory (and then, that's only on an x64 system and with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE set; on an x86 system the conventional limit per-process is 2GB, or 3GB with the /3GB flag). For more technical explanations, see these links: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/memory-limits-applications-windows/ https://superuser.com/questions/392235/whats-the-virtual-memory-address-space-limitation-of-a-win32-application https://support2.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=889654 http://www.viva64.com/en/l/0002/ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/291988 Skyrim cannot "break" these rules; it's a 32-bit application. AFAIK Skyrim does not natively ship with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE set, which will cap it to 2GB of memory (see links above for "why"), even on x64 systems. I'm sure there's mods that address that, however (and then you would be limited to 3GB on x86 Windows, or 4GB on x64 Windows). I agree with bben that it would be nice if the next Bethesda game were 64-bit (I'm honestly holding out hope that Fallout 4 will have a 64-bit executable, but perhaps that's too optimistic).

I'm admittedly skeptical of the GeForce 605's ability to run the game "smoothly on high" (perhaps it can at low resolutions), but the advice you got in the other thread is not bad either. I can't see why LOOT would be a problem - if you can find the specific mod that would be helpful to see what's going on. It may be that they're requesting you don't clean the masters (which LOOT will flag and tell you to do, but you don't want to clean some files as it can cause problems (and LOOT only "knows" a few of those)), or it may be that the mod author wants their mod in a specific place (and if this is the case they should submit that to LOOT developers so its properly sorted), which you can ofc do after LOOT finishes its job.

When you say "freezing" do you mean it locks up or crashes (e.g. you must restart the game to keep playing), or you're going along and then it "hangs" or "stops" for a second or two and/or is choppy? I ask because the GeForce 605 may just not be up to the task of the game (or the settings you've selected), performance wise, so you're getting hangs from that. Just a thought. If it's locking up/crashing that's likely unrelated to your hardware. Have you tried LOOT sorting your mods?

Your poor performance is likely heavily influenced by mods. I had no problems hitting 100 FPS (or better) with a Core 2 Quad Q9550 and Radeon HD4870X2 (which was no slouch back when NV was a new game). amBX would take a big chunk out of that, as could some mods that introduced more NPCs, bigger textures, etc to the game. In some cases it can be a single mod that just wrecks performance for one reason or another, at that point you have to decide if the mod's content is more important than the game running well. As far as your i7 goes - CPUs have been largely stagnant for years now (ignoring advances in power efficiency, multimedia encode/decode support (e.g. QuickSync), and IGPUs - none of this is likely a factor for your usage/configuration); it should be no problem for this game, or many others. If the game runs poorly "stock" then there's something to worry about, but honestly speaking I don't think you have a problem other than running tons of mods.

Who's talking about a "hybrid drive" here? I never suggested one, and I don't think Tehmedic101 was looking at one either. The original spec-out had an SSD and a mechanical HDD, and I'm assuming that's due to large storage needs more than anything else. I'm suggesting all PCIe storage given the budget, or at least all PCIe storage for all applications + Windows if there's a huge music/movie/picture library (multi-TB) that can go on a Green or whatever else. That makes no nevermind, and is cheaper (there's really no need/benefit to having your music library or movie library (even if they're HD files) on an SSD or anything else that fast if you're only serving to a single user - it's just pouring money at something that isn't a problem). SATA would be perfectly fine too; I don't think anybody is contesting that either. But I got the impression that "budget is not an issue" for this kind of build, so again, why not go for that last 5% of performance?

Just to clarify, let's call your current SSD "SSD 1" and your other hard-drive "HDD 1" - If you're wanting to add another drive, and the end-result will be SSD 1 + SSD 2 + HDD 1, and Windows/everything else will stay on SSD 1 as it currently is, then no you don't need to re-install Windows or anything else. Power the machine off and mount and install the second drive just as you did the first drives, and when it reboots Windows should see the drive (assuming it isn't DOA or whatever) and you can format it (NTFS ideally) and away you go.

I'll preface this: I have not toyed around with OS X since before Apple went Intel, and I have no experience with Wineskin or Cider. When you say the mods "aren't appearing" do you mean they don't appear to the Skyrim launcher, or that the Skyrim launcher shows them and you're ticking the box to enable, and then the game just acts like the mod isn't loaded?

Before you go any further, my first piece of advice would be that if Fallout 4 is your main target, wait until its requirements/specs are announced and then build to that. It will probably have higher requirements than many games older than it (e.g. Skyrim), so backwards compatibility should be good too. It may mean waiting a month or two longer, but you can always use that time to learn more about PCs and hardware, and it should minimize the risk of the system not being up to the task later this year when FO4 launches (or having to do an upgrade 2 months after you just built your new toy). Waiting for this is also a good idea because Intel is set to launch a new CPU platform this fall (Skylake), which may yield higher performance over the current Haswell/Broadwell platform, or at the very least should mean discounted prices on Haswell/Broadwell components as retailers try to unload them. To answer your questions: 1) Assuming you're in the US, around $1000 USD is a good place to start. If you have parts that you can re-use (e.g. monitors, keyboards, mice, speakers, hard-drives, etc) you can probably save some money (or get higher performing parts without blowing your budget up). You can of course go nuts and spend $10,000 or more, but in fairness there's going to be a "break" somewhere in the $3000-4000 range where any additional money is probably going into aesthetic or non-performance hardware. For example if you want a 20TB RAID storage array, that will cost more, but it won't have any bearing on how well the machine runs Fallout. Or as another example, if you want a whiz-bang modified case, that can get very expensive very quickly, and have no impact on anything other than how the system looks. There's also entire "genres" of peripherals that you can end up spending exorbitant sums of money on (e.g. audio, displays, keyboard/mouse). 2) Shopping around is fine, as long as the stores you're shopping at are good places to shop in general (e.g. have good return policies, good customer service, won't disappear in 3 months, won't bait-and-switch, etc). Again, assuming you're in the US, I would suggest starting with Newegg, Best Buy, Amazon, and perhaps Wal-mart (they actually do sell some PC hardware online). I would suggest checking any retailer against ResellerRatings before making a purchase, and you may use something like PC Part Picker to try comparison shopping on a specific item, but in the era of price-matching and online shopping, I wouldn't expect dramatic differences. A perhaps more useful tool would be camelcamelcamel.com, which tracks pricing trends on Amazon (they also have subsidiary sites camelbuy.com (for Best Buy) and camelegg.com (for Newegg), however IME both of those stores have more stable pricing (e.g. Best Buy doesn't adjust the price on an item in-store 3-4 times a day, like Amazon sometimes does)). 3) Doesn't really matter either way. The only risk with incremental purchases is if you're intending to spread everything out over like a one-two year period (e.g. you don't have a lot of money every week/month to throw at this), because by the time you finish you may have parts that've gone outdated or become incompatible (e.g. you buy a CPU and then in a year go to buy it a motherboard, and can't easily find a motherboard that will support that CPU). The other problem if you end up dragging your feet on incremental purchases is you may not be able to test if all of your parts work within the 30-day (or howeverlong) return period from the retailer. That said, if you were to build the "basic guts" of the machine (e.g. CPU, MB, RAM, case, PSU, etc) and then plan to add extra parts (like a high end discrete graphics card, or a second graphics card for SLI/CF, or more hard-drives, or more RAM, or a high end sound card, etc) that can work perfectly well. 4) This is kind of a contentious question, believe it or not. If you want "just the facts" - they are capable of higher read/write speeds at lower latencies (read: data moves faster) than mechanical hard-drives (they are, however, still hard-drives). However, whether or not this will help your situation any is where things get somewhat contentious. SSDs can only improve read/write speeds and access latencies, which means if you have some task that is disk-bound (that is, it would run faster if the disk were faster), an SSD can improve performance (if, and only if, the data for that task is stored on the SSD). An example where this helps is loading times in many games (with a fast enough disk, even Half-Life 2 can feel mostly seamless). However, they have no influence on tasks that are computationally-bound (that is, it would run faster if the computer itself were faster). An example where this is true is the actual 3D rendering of a game. The SSD isn't going to improve how fast the GPU works. SSDs also cost a lot more per-GB (per unit of storage) than mechanical drives. Generally I don't think an SSD is worth it if you're on a tight budget and need a lot of storage capacity. However if your budget can support it (or you don't need much storage capacity), fast storage (which doesn't have to mean SSD - there are quality mechanical drives that are still fairly robust) can be a nice "extra" as it usually means games will load and start faster, which is always nice imho (who really wants to sit on a loading screen anyways?). 5) Relative to what? It's extra complexity and another maintenance item at a higher price to (potentially) yield a quieter or cooler-running system. That said, there are a lot of options for really good air coolers that will give you quiet and cool-running performance as well, and they will probably cost less to do it. I would say it probably depends on your budget and how much time you want to invest in the construction and maintenance of the machine more than anything else. 6) Compared to how things were [many] years ago when I got into PC building, there's *tons* of video and pictoral guides that you can find for free online (as opposed to paying for books or hoping to heck that your buddy knows what he's doing), and I'd encourage you to read/view as much of that content as you can stand. In many cases you can probably find videos showing the specific products you're looking at, so you have a very good idea of what to expect before you're hands-on with your new toys. Some other advice that I think would've helped me out back in the day: - Expect to spend the good part of a Saturday afternoon, if not a good part of your entire weekend, on your first build. Just because seasoned builders can throw a machine together in 45 minutes like it's nothing doesn't mean you should expect to do the same your first time. Don't cut corners; take your time and do it right. Starting things at 3 AM when you have to be at work/school/wherever tomorrow morning at 7 is probably a bad idea. That's when mistakes happen and small problems become big deals. - Have a decent selection of tools at-hand before you start. Generally you'll want a screw-driver or three, needle nose pliers, and a flash light at the bare minimum. Better to have it available than to get side-tracked digging through the garage for 3 hours looking for a screw-driver. - Have a big and sturdy/stable enough workspace to let everything sprawl out. The floor is usually a great place for this, if you have that option. A big table can also work well. - Leave any sort of whiz-bang peripheral stuff (e.g. your crazy surround sound system) for day 2. Just focus on getting the machine itself built at first, and then integrate all of the "extra" stuff with it after that's accomplished, just as you would integrate that stuff with your current laptop (or whatever). - Don't be surprised/discouraged if your get DOA parts. It happens to everyone. Even if you've done your homework and picked quality manufacturers, good parts, and so forth. This is why you bought all your parts from good retailers that will exchange them painlessly for you. The corrolary to this one is, all parts have a given failure-rate, and you can probably always find some enraged person unloading in the "user reviews" section for whatever component you're looking at. I'm not saying ignore those 1-star reviews, but take them with a grain of salt unless they're the majority of reviews for a given product. - The importance of standoffs cannot be overstated. - The importance of a quality power supply cannot be overstated.

PCIe SSDs can offer higher bandwidth, lower latency, and have no reliance on SATA controllers. A lot of newer motherboards will also take them as m2 card add-ons, which will save space and wiring. That isn't to say SATA implementions are bad or anything, and I'd probably agree with your 70/75% dichotmy overall - but we're talking about a budget of $4000+ here, so why not go for the last 5%?

You can find out more about your PC via various applications - if it's a pre-build (e.g. an Asus) you can probably just open up System Properties (right click on Computer -> Properties, and it should have model/manufacturer information, which (as bben said) we can look up and probably tell you more about what's inside. Alternately, just open it up yourself and see what's stamped on the power supply and if it has a PCI Express x16 slot available.

Do you know more complete specs of your PC? Would be very helpful in discussing/plotting/etc upgrades.

Is this text that's running alongside dialog (e.g. Bethesda NPCs - Amata in Vault 101 is a Bethesda NPC, as is Liam Neeson's character ("your dad"))? Or voiceless text that's running on a character added by a mod? Generally the game will play text as long as the dialog soundclip is running, and IME I've not had issues keeping up with the Bethesda NPCs, but for mod-added NPCs without voice files, the text may flash too quickly (e.g. an entire multi-line segment just flashes up for a second or two). There are mods that fix this (offhandedly I cannot remember the name of one for FO3; for Skyrim an example is Fus ro D-oh - Silent voice), and some mods include "blank" voice files to address the issue as well (to keep the text on-screen longer). Search for something like "voiceless subtitles fix" and you should find what you need. If you're trying to make the Bethesda NPCs take longer to "talk" I'm sure there's a mod for it, but it's nothing I've ever looked into or used; hopefully someone else is aware of something if that's your issue.

Impossible to say with any certainty - specs haven't been released as far as I know. That said, if you can run FO3/NV and Skyrim, I'd expect FO4 to at least be playable, but it may not run very well. Out of curiosity though, does your system have a PCI Express slot available? It would be fairly trivial to add a more powerful graphics card, which would improve things for FO3/NV and Skyrim, and likely improve your odds for FO4 as well. What are the rest of your system's specifications? IIRC HD 4000 means Ivy Bridge (or better), so the CPU should be pretty competent, and as long as you have a decent amount of RAM (or can upgrade; it's also easy) it's probably a pretty competent box.

The issue being captured via screen-shot makes me think it could be a driver or configuration problem. Have you tried re-installing and/or updating your graphics drivers? To check that it's not a problem with the machine overall, do you get these kinds of problems running other games or 3D applications?

Try turning draw distance down. Scripts can also cause problems, as you've observed. Lots of AI stuff (e.g. tons of follower/additional NPC mods) can be problematic. amBX (if you have that) also hits frame-rates *significantly* in New Vegas, so turning it off (if you can live without it) is wise too. That said, IME Fallout New Vegas (and Fallout 3) usually end up being more demanding or worse performing than Skyrim, especially with lots of mods running. Getting more technical: your system doesn't have 8 cores, it has 4 cores with HyperThreading (SMT), which presents 8 logical processors (and yes this is a significant difference). Try running without HyperThreading, or starting the application with the /affinity hook and setting the affinty mask to the first two or three logical processors, and see if that helps. IME HyperThreading is usually not a blessing for gaming.

LOOT 0.5.0 and older will also work in XP (according to their documentation); support for XP was removed in 0.6.0. Manually sorting load order would also be possible depending on how many mods and so forth that you're dealing with.

I don't like the Nexus forums' quote thing (because I can't break your post up and respond to each "chunk") so I'll keep using bullet points - I'm saying this because I don't want my post to come across as incredibly short/terse, I'm just trying to organize it logically: - Performance will be better with 2x8 (any 2 DIMM configuration actually - it will run in 1T), and given the massive budget you have, why not go 4x8 (vs 4x4) if you're set on having this waterblock? (Which, again, is 100% unncessary - DRAM devices do not get anywhere near that hot, but I certainly understand/respect aesthetic choices). 32GB kits are only around $200, and it'd basically end the discussion about "do I have enough RAM" for a good long time. - PSU is nice. EVGA has been doing consistently good things recently. - I've heard that rumor too, but that very very likely won't affect anything that isn't running in DirectX 12 (just like DX11 features aren't available for DX9, or DX9 features aren't available for DX7, etc), and all of that aside, 4GB of VRAM is still more than enough for any game (currently) on the market (and I would be honestly surprised if Fallout 4 is going to be the game that changes that). If you have links to whatever people on reddit are claiming they can actually use >4GB of VRAM/RAM for a Win32 D3D9 application I'd be interested to see them. Basically my point is, don't shy away from the Fury or any other current top-end card because they aren't Titan X with 12GB. The Titan cards, at least historically, had all that extra memory for compute, not DirectX, but with Maxwell its kind of a white elephant because they knee-capped FP performance even on the Titan part (actually even on the Quadro part too). - Windows 10 Pro will require 7 Pro or 8.1 Pro for the upgrade; Home Premium/whatever will upgrade to Windows 10 Home. If your goal is 10 Pro, I'd probably get 8.1 Pro (afaik its cheaper than 7 Pro currently, and can still be bought Retail); it'll give you DX11.x/12 support in the interim (Win7 doesn't get 11.x and 12), and then you can upgrade to 10 in July/August when its out, and having Win8 will mean comparable DX support in the event you want to hold off the upgrade for a month or two due to whatever - just gives you more wiggle room if DX12 matters for you. - Headphone geek here :D ; AD700 (and their replacement, AD700X) are a fine entry/mid-level open-back headphone, they have very little bass though, and are quite different from "A700X" (what you said in the original post), which are a closed-back model. Neither is a terrible choice, but there are ofc better or other options (at all manner of price points). As far as a mic and all that - the included beam-forming noise-cancelling mics with the Sound Blaster Z series are great for what they are, and the headphone amplifiers in those cards are also fine (especially for an Audio-Technica). Honestly imho this is an entirely separate, and equally large, topic, but the short version is that you should consider auditioning a variety of pairs of headphones, and narrowing it down to what kind of sound and performance you actually want. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the Ax700 series are head-and-shoulders beyond *any* gaming-oriented headphone/headset on the market these days though; years ago when AD700 was the de facto suggestion for any gaming build that was true, but a lot has changed in the last ten-fifteen years. - Within your budget, I'd say you should answer a question regarding: is the machine solely/primarily about gaming, or is it also heavily about multimedia content (e.g. are you going to be doing a ton of h264 encoding or whatever). For pure gaming, the i5-4690 will perform comparably to the 47xx chips (because HyperThreading doesn't do much of anything), and it costs less (K variants are available, if you're wanting to overclock; otherwise I'd get the low-power S variant, as it will run cooler). For gaming + lots of multimedia/rendering/whatever the i7 1150 chips have some advantages due to HyperThreading, but the six-eight core 2011-3 chips will do a nicer job still. Either way, the CPU, motherboard, 32GB of RAM, and hard-drives should be under $2000 (I'm estimating around $100-$300 for the MB, $200 for the RAM, $200-$400 for the CPU, and $200-$400 for storage), which should leave enough for an SLI/CrossFire configuration of your choosing, and still get you in at around that $3k ballpark. - I wanted to add on the storage thing: the whole "Boot SSD + mechanical storage" thing is utterly pointless imho - I know, I know, it's trendy and everyone and their grandmother does it, even HP and Dell do it, but the SSD will only benefit data stored upon it (and then, only read/write times - it will not help computationally constrained tasks one iota), so having a puny SSD just so you can see Windows boot really fast (and I really don't get why this itself is such a big deal to anyone) is just a waste imho. This isn't to say SSDs (or more broadly, fast disks) are bad - they're great, and in gaming improve things like save/load times, level load times, game start-up times, etc which is absolutely awesome. So basically what I'm saying is, go for a large enough fast drive (or RAID array, or whatever) for all of your applications, Windows, etc. For me, 500GB is not generally large enough for that (my Steam folder alone is nearly that big), but for you it might be (you know your own storage needs better than anyone else ofc). Given such a large budget, you may be able to swing a PCIe SSD, especially if your storage needs aren't that big in terms of installed applications, which would improve performance even further (and, let's be honest, they're just downright cool). For the mechanical side, I'd probably go with WD Greens if they're just going to store back-ups, music, etc - the new ones are more than fast enough for that, and will run cooler and quieter than Blacks or other higher-performance models (and really, just for holding a bunch of mp3s or pictures or ripped movies or whatever, that extra performance won't matter). Overall, if you aren't up against any kind of deadline on building this system right now, it may be a good idea to wait for Fallout 4 (or at least more information about Fallout 4), as well as the Fury to launch (and ideally come down in price some). Also remember that Intel Skylake is coming out *very* soon, and that may be worth considering over Haswell/Devil's Canyon, assuming it offers improved performance (Broadwell was largely a snoozer for desktops, but Skylake is supposed to bring some more improvements).

Some questions: - Why go with 4x4GB as opposed to 2x8GB? It will limit expansion in the future (e.g. you couldn't step up to 32GB with another 2x8GB kit), and it will run at 2T which will decrease memory performance somewhat. Since you're going from a ground-up new build, it makes more sense imho to go with a 2x8 kit. - I'd consider a PSU maker other than Corsair - some of their recent offerings have been less than spectacular (AX series aside). - Why a Blu-ray drive? No software is distributed on BD-ROM, and playback of Blu-ray movies will require additional (relatively expensive) software (e.g. from Corel). - Why not Windows 7/8.1 Pro? - What are you planning to plug the headphones into, and any specific reason you've picked that model? You do also realize that A700X is not a headset - it's a pair of stereo headphones. You would need an additional microphone if you need voice communication abilities. As far as "4GB of VRAM isn't enough" - the amount of hype nVidia has created in the last few months about how much everyone and their grandmother needs 96GB of VRAM just to run Doom 95 at 320x240 all minimum at 15 fps is seriously getting out of hand. 4GB is more than enough for anything that exists today (Skyrim shouldn't even be a discussion; Fallout 4 is a complete unknown until it releases and is benchmarked). Overall, this looks like a significantly overpriced machine relative to its performance - for $4000 it should offer much more performance than it does, and I think big chunks of that "bloat" are into accessories that do nothing for performance (like a nearly $200 keyboard, completely unncessary memory waterblocks, etc). At that price point you should be able to be talking high-end multi-GPU, 2011-v3 with DDR4, and a PCIe SSD to be entirely honest.

Honestly I've never experienced any of this "AMD is the bane of the world" with my 4350, 4890, 4870X2, or 290X. I've had no problems with updates, install/uninstall, and the only "software requirement" they impose is .NET (which a lot of other stuff requires too, so I assume it is installed on most everyone's PCs). I've not experienced "require months to have fixes" in at least a decade either, and they also tend not to break older games/applications as willingly/often as nVidia does. As far as 290X for this system - it would be fantastic in terms of performance, price, and so forth. But then there's the power and cooling requirements inside of an SFF build; I wouldn't want to try powering up a 290X with only a 330W PSU, and even with a quieter/better-cooled model like the XFX/MSI/Gigabyte options, it may still produce too much heat (heat is more than "temperatures") for the SFF case to handle. Fury Nano may still be a good consideration though, but AMD seems to be perrenially unpopular these days.

Just go into the config ini and set it to 1080p.

There's actually a fairly big gap between current "entry level" or "low end" (I'm trying to make that as value-less of a category as possible) cards like the 740 series, and "mid-range" or "gaming" cards, like the 760 series. Certainly something like 970 would be faster still, but my point is, you may be over-shooting on the upgrade depending on exactly what kind of performance you're looking for, especially coming from where you are now. GTX 745 is a fine card for anything non-gaming, and "light" handling of heavier games (e.g. Skyrim/whatever) but upgrading to something like the GTX 960 would still be a pretty significant gain. If your budget is limited, it may make more sense to go with the 750/960 route as opposed to the bigger upgrade to the 970. A lot of current games will struggle at 4K on even top-end cards, like 980, and some will still not run great at 1080p on higher-end cards. See this review of the 980 Ti for examples: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9306/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-ti-review/4 For "vanilla" Skyrim, you should have no problems with a 960 or 970, but with heavy mods that situation may change dramatically. Most LCD computer monitors run at 60Hz; many higher-end models, and CRTs, will run at 75Hz or higher. This is field rate, however, not frame rate. Technically, assuming the machine can match frame rate to field rate with no problems, the 16ms difference between 30Hz and 60Hz is unlikely to be a problem unless the renderer's latency is right on the edge (RAGE is probably the only current engine I can think of where this may be a factor). It is and it isn't. You can't just compare the console's specifications straight-across to a PC, because there's significantly higher degrees of optimization for console ports, as well as a much higher degree of hardware access through console APIs. This means that consoles have potentially better flexibility for game support than a PC. To use the "last gen" as an example, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 both came out around the same time as Oblivion, and run that game fairly well. A top of the line PC from back then (~2005) is "better" at that. However, that PC won't run (or won't run very well) new games like GTA5, Battlefield 4, or Skyrim. I'm not trying to "take a side" here - it's just a technical difference between the two platforms. Both can be very good, but the gaming PC will likely end up costing more over the long-run, as relatively frequent upgrades will become part of the experience, while you will be able to keep the console for at least its effective market life (which is usually like 5-7 years). Honestly I agree with Vagrant0 as far as "sit down and think about your goals." From your responses to this thread, it sounds like any competent mid-range/gaming card should be suitable, and it may be easier/simpler to go with something a bit less robust than the 970. Upgrading graphics cards every year was not an uncommon feature for gaming PCs - but in recent years we've experienced "console stagnation" due to the limits of the Xbox360 and PlayStation 3. With new consoles on the market, this situation seems to be changing, at least somewhat. I don't think we'll go back to how things were ten-twenty years ago, but the "free lunch" of the last few years is likely over. EDIT PS: I forgot to add, on the 144Hz feature of your monitor - I wouldn't worry about that with Skyrim. IME the game gets kind of wiggy running at 144 FPS, so I tend to lock it at 60Hz/60FPS.