hangarspace

Three key ingredients for a good skyrim pc GPU : 3GB ram, no less. For me it's a 7970 CPU : I5 processor minimum (I won't say I7 since I don't think the benefits warrant the extra cost) SSD : Put your OS, game and mods on a fast ssd (~500mb r/w) Personally, I have one for my OS and one for Skyrim after that it's up to you, no need to go overboard on the ram, 8GB will be fine. Thats basically what my rig is and I run the same sort of mods as you want to and get excellent performance. Have fun! Chris

I don't think I would bother choosing a 7870 over a 7850. The 7850 can be over clocked to nearly as much as the 7870 and I doubt the missing cores/shaders would really be noticeable in-game. If anything, I would save a bit longer and look at a 7900 series instead, it'll cost more but give better performance over the 7800 series and have better support/performance for future games rather than find yourself wanting to upgrade again in six months time. Chris

Why should they spend money, time or resources on that when the modding community will do it for free? :devil:

Go for an over clock on the cpu, it costs nothing, unless you overcook things! Unless you are going for some stupid liquid nitrogen cooled over clock, I don't think you'll have any problem with you psu. What the result will be can't really be said, but it's definitely worth a shot. If things don't work out, sell the mobo, cpu and ram on fleabay and put the money towards a new i5 and mobo. So far as the GPU goes, one way to look at it would have been to have bought the 670 rather than the 650 at the time, granted that might be considered overkill for the rest of the hardware, but then at least when you uprated the rest you wouldn't end up with a GPU bottleneck and would only have had to spend the money once. Tho, there is also a very good reason to hold out until the 670's drop down then upgrade. But hey, hindsight is a wonderful thing and money only goes so far and, yes, I'm the fool that went and spent £300+ on a 3GB 7970 and a fast SSD just to play Skyrim. Have fun whatever you decide to do! Chris

Looks alright at first glance. Are you having a problem? If so, check the load order and try the 'BOSS' tool, but for so few mods it's just as easy to read the mod notes and order them by hand. Chris

Probably quite impressive, but it's difficult to make any real meaningful comparison since many, like myself, probably just play on a single monitor. How about recording the same stats but running on a single monitor at 1920x1080 which is probably a more common resolution, for sure it'll be good and of course it won't take into consideration the different texture/enb's different people run but it would be interesting to see none the less. Chris

It really depends on what mods you use, whether it is 10 or 500 isn't the point it's what they individually add to the game that has an effect . I have a 3GB 7970 and it gets extremely close to 3GB, in fact it has probably exceeded it at times, but then I have a lot of large environmental textures along with things like lush trees, lush this, lush that, more npc type mods, busy inns etc etc. But also, I only run at 1920x1080 which probably saves me a bunch of vram over 2560x1440. My advice would be, yes it will definitely run better than a 2gb card, but it's still surprisingly easy to exceed your limits. Chris

I did and it hurt in the pocket. I was traditionally a console gamer, but skyrim put an end to that. Never having had a 'gaming' PC I still cringe at how much I spent on a 7970 graphics card last year shortly after they came out (worst time to buy new tech) but don't regret it now. With the amount of hours you put into this game you really might do all you can to enjoy it the most. Not everyone is in a position to do this tho and I feel for their despair, but their time will come. Chris

Maybe Katixas cider house which lets you grow an orchard, harvest apples, brew the cider, buy meat and bread, cook it and sell it to your customers and take orders. It also lets you hire a helper to. There are several mods that allow for hunger, thirst and other real-life things, "Realistic Needs and Diseases" is one of them, then there is "Frostfall" and another is "Wet and Cold". 3rd, don't know. Chris

The closest I got to this was creating a mod for each of my characters so they were effectively an NPC and then changing which ones were loaded depending on which character/save I was wanting to play. This last part was made much easier with mod organiser due to it's 'profiles'. Of course, it means that the storyline is completely different between the saves and the npc version of the character will get 'out-of-date'. Chris

For a clean start it doesn't matter. Make sure you have the latest versions of the mods and that you have double checked their compatibility/load orders either manually or by running BOSS. It would also be a good idea to use a mod tool like NMM or the superior Mod Organizer to control your mods. Chris

Not that I've noticed, mine appear under that path. You could check the profile folder, but I doubt it. Is there anyway to change the default path for the log files? Chris

First thing, post up you BOSS mod list so we can actually see what mods you are running, but bear in mind what the guys have already mentioned. Chris

There are some ini settings which affect the distance their textures are updated and there are various LOD mods which might help, all subject to you rigs performance. Chris

You could always try a different mod tool like mod organizer, it really is very good. If you haven't looked at it, you should. Chris