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

Might be useful to list your mods for others to see what you are using. Chris

It's surprisingly easy to overload even a high spec pc. Give us a run down on your actual hardware spec and a boss list of your mods. A 7600 series gpu isn't really that powerful compared to a 7900, and 32gb of system ram doesn't equate to huge performance gains over 8 when it comes to mods. Chris

A good place to start is looking at the top endorsed files, your are usually going to get well proven mods that way. For textures, look at the texture pack combiner mod and the automatic variants mod. Their pages will also mention other eye candy mods you could look at. Make sure you read the mod requirements and use NMM or mod organizer which make installing and configuring mods easy and along with BOSS will keep things in order. Also look at enb's and lighting effect mods. I run the climates of Tamriel mod with a compatible enb and the realistic ligniting overhaul mod. What spec hardware do you have, I run a 3gb 7970 and its easy to push that to the limits with texture mods. Using the mods I've mentioned above wil get some looking pretty good using wel supported and tested mods. Good luck and enjoy it Chris

Recently getting back into SR and starting all my mods from scratch I'm having a few graphical oddities (purple textures) so thought I should monitor my vram usage to see if it's maxing out somewhere I'm using Afterburner to monitor things but can't get it to work when using an ENB (wrapper), but if I run it without any enb it seems to work ok. So my VRAM usage sat around 2.4 to 2.6Gb and after spawning a few dragons in Dawnstar it maxed out at around 2.9Gb with the GPU over 95% and a framerate 35 to 60 fps once things get going. This is on my MSI 7970 3gb card. I didn't expect it to be so high, it was quite surprising, despite using quite a lot of hi-def textures I didn't expect it to be that high. Question 1, I've seen some mention of a tool to optimise the textures in the mods, what tool is it and does it have much effect? Question 2, Will the ENB have much effect on VRAM usage or is it more GPU and if i'm reaching 99% GPU with no enb when monitoring, what happens when I run an enb which pushes the GPU harder, drop in framerate, missing textures or crashes? Question 3, Is there anyway to use Afterburner with an ENB, (injector version? will that work with any enb?) Thanks for looking. Chris

Good luck with saving your game, you might also want to try and backup your mods which will be saved to your save game. If you can't save them or don't get them all, once you get up and running again come back and ask on the forum how to find out what mods are missing. Chris

As per the other replies EXCEPT, you maybe able to squeeze some extra performance out of it by.... 1) More ram 2) Fiiting an SSD 3) Tweaking the OS to disable lots of tasks and processess (google 'improve windows performance') Chris

I doubt it's a mod issue. Make a backup of your skyrim folder, saves, mods etc so you wont loose any gameplay and then completely uninstall skyrim, then go and manually delete the skyrim game folders and any skyrim user data (ini files) and anything else you can find related to the game, apart from the backups you made first. Next uninstall all the nvidia drivers and kombuster etc. I think you should google uninstalling the nvidia stuff as I seem to remember seeing references to do this an ensure it really has been uninstalled. Then after a re-boot, start again by installing the nvidia drivers and then the game and see what happens. Chris

We had to disable 'Skyrim Distant Detail' mod which was conflicting with at least one of the houses. If that doesn't work for you, then your best way to find it is to disable half the mods and see what happens, if it works then re-enable half of them etc etc. Eventually you'll be able to narrow it down to the one that is causing the problem. It took us less than 20 minutes to find the cause with over 80 mods installed. Chris

Have you tried a 'NEW' game as it sounds like you have a rogue script in your save game. Chris

The way we found our conflict with the skyrim distant detail mod was a process of turning off half the mods at a time until it worked and then turning them back on a few at a time. Took about 15 minutes to find our cause out of 80 mods. Chris