I've had Problems with AA with Weird Pixels showing up all over the Screen and everyone has said to Turn AA off and it fixes that issue. When the game first came out Is the day I bought the game and it Ran Perfectly on High with AA on after Driver Updates and Steam Patches AA started Messing up and the game began to be laggy, also I wounder if the Free Texture DLC is partially to blame for FPS Loss? I've found that texture loading time is a big deal. If your disk system is slow, it can make gameplay pretty tedious sometimes. While my computer is not terribly fast by todays standards, it's more than enough to play games like Skyrim at 1080p... except for the old, crappy SATA controller on this motherboard. I've done some things to get around it with testing. If you have a good, fast USB controller and USB thumb drive, the readyboost option can help performance. While read/write bandwidth is much lower than your sata drives, the seek time's are much, much lower, and can bring up files much more quickly because of it. In any case, download and install GPU-Z, fire it up, then run your games. Quit the game, or tab out, or throw GPU-Z on another monitor if you have multiple monitors hooked up, and see just how much of your cards resources are being used during skyrim. If the card is showing the RAM at peak usage, try backing down some of the settings. See the screenshot below. The highlighted areas show video card usage during gameplay of skyrim on my rig. About 75% GPU load and very little memory usage. This is with the HD textures turned on. Means I could turn settings up even more, but the fact is, my rig isn't feeding enough data to the card to overburden it. Do some testing. I'm going to try skyrim on a RAMdisk (partitioning off a certain amount of RAM to act as a hard disk.)