[A mod that allows me to play a good character]

I agree. The Dragonborne is supposed to be a saviour right?

 

No, the Dragonborn is supposed to be what you want them to be, that's the whole point of a TES game; your character is special in that they have a destiny, a singular act they will perform or an inherent quality they have for which they will become renowned, but beyond that the game says nothing. This is actually spelled out plainly for you by the Greybeards if you listen to their dialogue; those who are Dragonborn have a purpose, but what is another matter.

 

And while more options is always nice, I'll take a game with a realistic, cutthroat ethical system over a black-and-white "kill them or have tea and crumpets in a sunlit wooded meadow and compliment their lovely hair" world any day of the week. You're complaining that a "goodie" character has to rationalise their actions in Skyrim in ways which make you uncomfortable, but that's the whole point; to put the player in a world where you do sometimes have to choose between adhering to your ethical beliefs and achieving your goals. Watering that experience down to let you play the "goodie" all the time takes all of the impact out of it.

 

Ironically, providing I adopt an appropriately "Viking" attitude, I've always found playing "good" characters much more satisfying than "evil" ones, because as usual in RPGs "evil" amounts to murderous thuggery or pointless psychopathy; where's the manipulation? The intrigue? The twisting of other people to serve your own whims and desires? The convoluted plans to take over the city/country/world? No mate, "good" players have it great in Skyrim, you can just avoid or refuse anything that doesn't fit your playstyle, and make individual exceptions to that if you choose, and you'll still have a full -if slightly truncated- experience; "evil" players get to go psycho or go home.

[GPU for for heavily modded Skyrim]

Having just done exactly this research, I settled on almost exactly the same rig you're planning(I'll be getting 1866 RAM). The 7970 and the 670 are pretty equivalent, they trade places depending on the game or benchmark by only a few FPS, with the 7970 coming out ahead slightly more often. It wins over the 670 for modded Skyrim however, even the 4GB version, because the 7970 has a much wider memory bus, so it has better memory performance overall. An overclocked i5 3570K is more than capable of handling physics processing, so dedicated PhysX support isn't something you should worry about; you can pick up a second cheaper Nvidia card later to use as a dedicated PhysX processor(a 550 or 640 should do the job) which will give you a modest performance boost in CPU-bottlenecked games.

 

The 680 is a nice card from a technical standpoint, but completely unnecessary and very poor value for money unless you're running an extremely high-res multi-monitor setup.

 

As you're planning to overclock, I heartily recommend the various closed-loop watercooling solutions from Corsair and Antec(you'll need an H-80, H100, or Kuhler 920 to get prime performance out of a 3570K); they cool better than top-of-the-range aircoolers, by a wide margin if you don't care about noise, for myself I prefer to run them with Noctua fans which still gives better temps than aircooling but also renders the CPU essentially silent, even under heavy load. If you're confident with PC construction, you can also look into "The Red Mod", which does the same for your graphics card by mounting a Kuhler 620 to the GPU using a custom bracket(also requires you add extra VRAM and VRM heatsinks). Again, that's an added cost, so you could put that off until a later date.

[Graphical enhancement for a 1GB 6850]

Hello, I'm new to modding Skyrim, and I'm trying to do the sensible thing and thoroughly investigate everything before I start fannying about with the actual game(I've been trawling YT, Nexus, and various tutorials for three days running now :P), however I've gotten a little stuck on the issue of HD textures.

 

For the record, my rig is a PhenomII x4 955 [email protected](factory OC'd), 4 gigs of Mushkin Silverline RAM(stock), and an XFI Dual-fan 6850 1Gb(factory OC'd).

 

I understand that which actual textures a person uses essentially comes down to personal taste, but I'm more concerned with what my computer is actually capable of running; there's Vano's optimised versions of the Bethesda HD pack, there's cestral's Texture Pack Combiner and all the associated texture packs, there's AdPipino's Optimiser tool....

 

So, am I better off looking about for Vano-style "lite" 1024 texture packs and just running them straight up, or can I get a better look with similar performance using the Optimiser on the bigger 2048 packs? If the latter, is it safe/possible to use the Optmiser and the Combiner together? Further, as I currently understand it, I could use the Bethesda pack and the Combined pack together, providing I install the Combined pack second so that it overwrites the Bethesda pack where appropriate; am I correct in that? I also plan to run one of the more modest ENBs and SSAO(if I can find a tutorial/explanation on the latter that doesn't make my brain melt out through my ears), but from what I've read if I pick the right one it should have a negligible performance impact.

 

Any advice is welcome,

Cheers.