Rennn

To be fair, your monitor is 15" which seems to hint it's 720p. That offers pretty big increases on performance from ENB and HD textures. Aside from that, lighting is generally much more efficient to improve graphics than meshes and textures. That's why the best looking PS3 games go for very low resolution textures and simple meshes, but can maintain quite nice lighting and decent graphics overall despite the weak PS3 specs. Lighting > Textures. The problem is ENB itself is badly optimized, so when I say "lighting > textures" I mean in-engine lighting like CoT or RLO, not post FX added by ENB.

That doesn't sound healthy. :/

Hmm... A torch bash won't work either? Thank you for the form, anyway. I'll see if I can figure something out.

This bug would sometimes occur in Fallout 3 and Fallout: NV as well. (So much for Bethesda's "new engine") I never found a way to fix it aside from uninstalling some HD textures, it seems to be linked to your VRAM being too taxed to properly LoD out objects. That said, you may have better luck than I did fixing it.

Get used to it. :/ Skyrim's engine is quite bad and ENB is unbelievably badly optimized on top of it. 3GB of VRAM use is easily possible (and indeed likely) running ENB and HD textures at the same time. Any other, better looking, newer game will take 1-1.5GB. But you have to be prepared for frustration trying to mod Skyrim's graphics, because it's just a resource hog with no efficiency at all.

Not really, it's yanking them up from their cover, destroying their cover, hitting them while they're behind cover, or re-positioning yourself behind their cover instantly. There's a lot more depth to the game than a whack-a-mole system with guns, if you play it that way you were doing it really wrong. Biotics and techs are the "spells" of a mage in any other RPG. Sure, you can make your mage pick up a dagger and flail continuously, but can you imagine the tedium of playing a game as a wizard with no spells?

There's no "end" end-game like there was in FO3 and FNV. Once the MQ is over the world is still open. Eh... Just pick the side that you agree with on a moral level, and you'll be fine. I think saying more than that would cause spoilers.

Well... Sort of. Dragonborn's ending has a quite large effect on Solstheim, but I haven't seen it affect the Skyrim mainland at all. The main quest has a bit more far reaching consequences, though I wouldn't necessarily say it's "more dramatic". The Dragonborn DLC does call for a relatively high level player. If you're not level 20+ I suggest you leave Dragonborn for after the main quest.

The 4GB memory patch doesn't do anything anymore. It hasn't for months, Bethesda already put it in the game by default but the engine still crashes at 3GB or slightly above. Try this instead. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50305/?

Well, when I replace my dying motherboard I'm planning to replace it with this. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128627 Not sure how much better or worse it is, I guess I'll leave that up to Werne... As for XP versus 7... Windows XP and 7 are both good for gaming. Not sure how long it's been since you kept up with operating systems, but Vista and Windows 8 are utter crap. You shouldn't encounter significant problems running Windows XP until it's retired in a month.

Hmm... So far I haven't managed to do it. I can make a custom spell with no visual effect that fits the requirements, but it's not showing up in the list of spells that can be applied to a torch... I'll keep messing with it. Maybe I need to put the spell in a form list or something.

You have 2GB of VRAM? Or 4GB? If Skyrim passes 3GB of use, it will often crash. I believe there's a workaround for that, probably called SSME or something.

Someone never learned how to use biotics or techs... :3

SkyUI or no SkyUI?

That's also probably due to overfilling your VRAM. That can cause it to CTD when it loads a whole new area. As others have said, you need to lose some effects or textures until you stop overfilling your VRAM.

Well, the torch burn effect is actually a "spell" according to the CK. So it would probably be possible to add another spell effect to torches that ignites oil during a bash the same as in-game spells do. Perhaps an invisible, short range 1 damage firebolt or something... idk. Actually, I want to mess around in the CK and see if I can do this now...

I think this is important, because there was a good deal of rage at the time of Skyrim's release about companies removing content at the last minute just to sell for extra $. Activision and EA are big culprits here, and Bioware (surprisingly NOT due to EA's influence, if the internets are to be believed) got caught red-handed a few months after Skyrim's release with Javek and Mass Effect 3. Had they released Hearthfires first, when it was so obviously supposed to be in the shipped package (and probably only got cut because of the show-boat release date) the internet would have exploded in fire and brimstone. Ofc, that fire and brimstone would be deserved. When there's content like that which was clearly supposed to be in the vanilla game, for the reasons IsharaMeradin mentioned, it should only be released as free DLC (like the HD texture pack). Making the players pay to access functions already present in the core game is a sure sign of profit obsession.

None of the mods that claim to do this are even close to complete.

Ehm... You know that a penis does not really have a bone in it, right?

Yet it ties with i3 3220 when all 4 threads are used, which is what most games nowadays use. And it outperforms low-end C2Qs, only mid-range/high-end C2Qs are faster. Performance per core (aka, IPC) is important for single-threaded software, anything that uses 4 cores like modern games will run roughly the same on that Phenom of yours as it does on an i3 cause it's a pseudo-quad-core (dual-core with HT). As far as I hear from people who still have those, overclocked C2Q and Phenom II CPUs are still decent for playing games, won't do Crysis 3 on ultra at 60FPS but it'll at least be playable on medium/high (for ultra you're looking at FX 83xx or IB/Haswell i7, even i5 4670K at 4.4GHz can't keep up with C3 ultra without dips, don't know why I'm saying this though). You have a problem with overclocking though - your board is dying with CPU on stock, which brings us back to that price balance talk. Yeah, but those reviews are written after a week or two, and I'm not talking about the board dying after a week or a month, I'm talking a year or two, your board didn't start giving out after a week/month either. The reviews are good though, I've even seen some overclocks there on FX 6300, still in the safe zone (4.3GHz or so) but they're overclocks. As I said, that 4+1 board is good for a 95W chip if OP won't overclock (he said he wouldn't). It has a VRM heatsink and supposedly supports 125W chips, though I wouldn't try putting a Phenom II or 8320/8350 in that thing. That's why I mentioned the board isn't that great, OP may have said he won't overclock but so did I and after a week I was at 4.5GHz, the difference being that I have a board capable of handling it. There's just something about unlocked CPUs that makes you go "Whee, I wanna fiddle with it!", though it may be just me that feels that way. :unsure: The main problem is, I really don't care if I can get Crysis 3 on high settings, because I don't play it. Many of the games I *do* have are heavily CPU oriented and only optimized for 2 or 3 cores, so I don't consider a CPU 'good' unless it has solid core-per-core performance and multithreaded performance, which my Phenom II lacks. It's also very disheartening to see the minimum required specs on certain games list a Phenom II x4 as equivalent (in that game) to a Core2Duo... Anyway, my motherboard is failing (which I most likely have confirmed now, as memtest turns up no errors) because of relative stupidity on my part, not because the motherboard was faulty. And it's a micro ATX model known to be bargain bin material... If he doesn't overclock, the chances of his failing are virtually nonexistent. I see the point you're making, but it doesn't seem cost efficient to plan on overclocking when he already said he wouldn't, and when the FX-6300 at stock speeds will already outperform his old CPU by like 200% core-per-core (and even higher multithreaded). The OP doesn't seem terribly interested in pushing graphics to their limits on ultra...

Did you install the mods in a different order than you did last time? The LoD textures may have overwritten each other. Also, I didn't know Lush Trees and Grass was compatible with the Skyrim Flora Overhaul??

Hey, there are a lot of idiots (IE, people who install CBBE, get purple female NPC textures, then deny it has anything to do with CBBE, for example), and we have no idea how to tell who they are without information. Starting with the painfully obvious suggestions usually saves a lot of time.

Delete your Skyrim.ini and Skyrimprefs.ini (you may want to simply rename them or move them if they have tweaks you need to back up). Run Skyrim and it will generate new vanilla inis automatically. If that fixes it, the bug was a result of a tweak gone bad or some sort of mistake on the engine's end. If that doesn't fix it, start looking at any lighting mods you have as the culprit (ELFX, ENB, RCRN, CoT, etc...) Your lighting looks very wrong, as if most of it is disabled.

You summarized what I always suspected perfectly.

Some of the dialogue changes in Dragonborn depending on whether you already beat the story, so before or after are both good.