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My machine specs are: Windows 7 64bit i7-960 Standard Western Digital HDD 12 Gb of Ram (Skyrim sadly can only use 3 of it though) GTX 680 4GB GPU My GPU is really what Skyrim uses the most, even my cpu doesn't go abover 40% barely. I don't have the most 'up to date pc' you could say but it runs modern games great. I run the game at 1920x1080 max settings, plus all the extra filters that the ENB lighting adds as well. My Skyrim has been very optimized though as I said in my previous post. Optimizing textures, cleaning files with Tes5 Edit, and making sure mods are compatiable with eachother makes all the difference in performance. Also to the above poster, you don't have to worry about the annoying intro of the game if you use a mod called 'Live another life'. It makes the game way more fun than having to go through same boring beginning over and over again.

Most graphics mods, including ENB, are awful. How are graphic mods awful? They make the game look wonderful :smile:

For the life of me I can't seem to find this clothing / Armor mod: Does anyone know what it is called / if it's on the nexus? I've seen it crop up in several images but can never seem to find it after searching through pages of the armor and clothing sections.

yeah its been a little low today. I usually try to go to the nexus later at night when it's less crowded.

I only started Skyrim on pc a few months ago (always had it for xbox) and have got my game quite stable and looking quite nice. Just an example since words are hard to show what I mean by 'nice': I get easily 40-60 fps in open world, load times are good, and crashes only happen if I purposefully break the game (like spawn literally 36 bandits in front of me and try to fight them all at once in a heavily modded section of the game haha). I don't think there is any golden set of mods that will guarantee a 100% stable non-crash expereince. Thats not to say you will crash but from everything I've read about how Skyrim was made for 32 bit and it's limitations of only able to use 3.1 GB of ram it's going to be a tradeoff of stability for making the game better sadly. I highly advise once you have the Legendary Skyrim downloaded to your pc from steam to make a backup of that vanilla state of the game. So if anything goes wrong in the future of your modding expereince you can simply revert back to a clean install of skyrim quickly and add mods back in instead of having to delete everything and redownload again from steam. I can really only post what mods you may like to use on my own personal preference (so if you hate some of the things I listed it's what I prefer to use, and currently have installed, not what you may care for) but after I had to nuke my Skyrim and start over since I was a little crazy the first time around adding mods here is the list of mods I install first. When I redid my Skyrim I created a nice little notepad for the order of mods I wanted to re-install, here is just the first half of it: Obviosuly everything I listed in the character and Animations category are optional and based on my personal preference, most of the others are more popular and used by many. Pretty sure other people will look at my list and be like "lolno" and that is fine. You will have to scoure the nexus and find for yourself what you'd like for I cannot tell you really if it would be for you. I am a complete sucker for character creation/spending a long time on the race menu tweaking my character exactly how I want them to be before I start a new game haha. You might not care for character creation in the slightest so those mods may not be for you. This list is only the first half. The rest of my favorite mods to install from my notepad goes on from sections 7-14 which has stuff like texture mods, spells, armor, new lands, and so on and so forth but sicne you wanted only the essentials those are what I install first if I have to redo my Skyrim folder. I leave textures after I get the main stuff done becasue I then make a backup of my Skyrim folder again as a 'starting setup' so if anything goes terribly wrong with the memory intensive installs of texture mods I can revert back. Also a good way to test performance and really see what texture enhancement mods really suck the life out of your pc. Here are the last important things to keep in mind when you mod in Skyrim: I Install these mods with NMM (Nexus mod manager) that can be download here on the nexus. It allows you to add mods to your game flawlessly so highly recommend it. I do not do any steam workshop mods since I beleive they try to auto update themselves and that cna mess with you Skyrim game if you ahve things perfect. New updates that you didn't want could break other mods or cause lots of problems.Cleaning the game using a program such as Tes5 Edit is also helpful as it can help performance.After you have a bulk of your textures/very graphic intensive mods you can download a program called 'texture optimizer' it really helps with load times and sometimes performance with no quality loss but smaller file sizes which means less usage of ramUsing a program called BOSS helps sort your load order, which it's not perfect it helps sort the load order ot your mods best it cna to fix any conflicts to allow the game to run properly and not crashWyre Bash is a program that is best used when you really start getting a ton of mods, it can create a bashed patch which will merge multiple mods together letting you pass the mod limit skyrim has, but you have to have a lot of mods to hit the limit lolYoutube is a great resource to see mods in action. Many youtube series that do weekly mods really show you a wide extent of various cool mods you may like. When I first got Skyrim on pc I spent an entire week watching a weekly Skyrim mod series downloading everything I wanted for my Skyrim. Also many tutorials on a lot of the tools I listed above. This is a great youtube playlist to start with: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-DdhDG41roBVJfNCqvO5MmKP Hope this helps, I'm no expert on anything but took the time to learn the tools, clean my game, and run a lot of performance tweaks/tools to get the game running perfect. It can feel like a lot of work but the payoff of having a fully modded and beautiful Skyrim in the end that runs well is worth it. Good luck :smile:

I've never really been into mmo's the few times I really tried it just did not hold my interest. I think I'm going to continue playing/exploring/creating characters in Skyrim and wait for the offline game Elder Scrolls VI to come. I feel Elder Scrolls is one of the best offline single player expereinces around and always connected online mmo's don't last long (unless they are amazingly good) or feel watered down since it can't be heavily modded.

Skyrim isn't even using your 8GB so you don't need to upgrade.The game sadly cannot utilize above 3.1 GB I beleive.

awesome thanks so much. I never noticed that tiny icon at first :happy:

I had a quick noob question: If I upload an image to the nexus is there way to link it to a specific mod? I see many mods with cool user submitted screenshots attached to them and wondered how it's done.

I agree with this. I too have a 680 4GB and while it has come in handy a few times for Skyrim having over 2GB of vram it's not necessary for most. I just wanted the extra vram in-case and for future games that may possibly need it. Comes down to what you want to buy and if you feel the extra cost to have the extra vram is worth it.

You should be able to run Skyrim with quite a few high end texture mods easily. I used to have a 650 ti and had really hi res texture packs (not even optimized ones) and still averaged between 30-40 out in the open world. I wasn't able to use any ENB lighting though, that killed it. I've since learned from those mistakes when I bought my 680 4GB card and nuked my Skyrim folder and did a clean install. I optimized textures, cleaned mods with Tes5 Edit, and looked at the load order more carefully. Things run so much more stable and I've got an absurd amount of texture / graphic enhancement mods like EMB enabled and my card's vram doesn't even get above 2GB barely. I never get infinite load times and can load instantly into open world unlike the past when stuff was not optimized. Just take care to clean/optimize mods when installing and I think your pc build should be ok ^_^

I too am curious about how to link images you upload to a specific mod. Would be great since I can thank the mod makers with pretty images =)

I think the unnoficial patches have to be near the top of your load order in a specific spot to run correctly.

Elgato Game Capture HD is what I use. Great capture device that can not only capture console gameplay but pc as well. Best part is it doesn't affect the pc cpu / gpu at all since it's a seperate device.

This topic seems to be one that comes up in most game forums where a game allows a player choice (which I love customization and choice). Thankfully people here seem more tolerable of others and how they choose to play =) I've always played female in almost every game that offers the choice between female or male. It just fits my play style way more, even if the game is Halo and being female has no difference it's just my default go-to-character. In RPG's and such it just makes sense towards my style in Skyrim as a sleek fast moving target. Not saying Male characters cannot be but if I'm going to go stealth or Archery I might as well use a female character. I always cringe when someone tells me "I'm not allowed to play Skyrim this way" or "Thats not lore friendnly uninstall it now you are ruining your game" when in reality we all have the right to choose and enjoy how we play and what characters we want to play as. When I bought Skyrim I had no intention to do super realistic lore freindly playthroughs. I play for the fun factor and enjoyment of customization more. To answer the OP's question, I play a mixture of everything really. More lore freindly female armor and mods and then more non-lore friendly characters for the fun on if. I've never been into the super hardcore lore style playthroughs. For me I get the fun out of exploration and just bieng a plain sucker for making my character look pretty while find cool treasures in dungeons and such. On the flip side I am planning to do a male playthrough (one day lol), I found an armor mode for Crusader knight armor and totally want a dude running around in full clad medieval armor, will be epic.