What would I need to upgrade to get more performance out of Skyrim?

[InDarkestNight]

Would that even really be worth it? The i7 7700 is going for $184.50 on amazon right now. My website though says its would only be a 25% improvement over what I currently have:

i7-7700 vs i5-6400

Would nearly $200 dollars for a processor made in 2017 really be worth the investment? How much of a difference would it actually make? As I said, processing speed may be a moot point in my case. As I said, linux can't run enb, so performance is moot. Le can't handle any textures above 2k, so that's also moot. It MAY solve the issue I'm having where the cart flips out if I have too many script-heavy mods installed, but who knows how much that would work? Besides, I could technically 'fix' the issue by just using Alternate Start (thinking about it though, maybe I could use alternate start, let immersive armors load, then chose the vanilla start?). I do suspect though that my game is eating up more processing power than it did before due to my comp now having to run an emulator to run it. Its more stable than its ever been by a long shot, but it still has its limits. I can't run as script-heavy of a game as I used to. Even ICBINE eats up far too much processing power (even if it doesn't give me any fps drop, but the load times scare me, with just it alone my load times are as bad as when I had over 100 esps installed, imagine what will happen when I do have 100 esps installed again!).

[InDarkestNight]

Also, I found a feature on my website just now that shows a 'typical build' for the processor! Apparently a more normal graphics card for my current processor would be a gtx 980. Yeah, I'm clearly not meeting the system reguirements for my 1050. The i7-7700 though is normally used with a tgx 1030. That's clearly closer than I thought to my current card. Looking up my card, I more typical processor would be a rhyzen 3 or 5. I can't use any rhyzen though, so that doesn't help me much. Funny enough, the ram I have is typical for my card, so I guess at least I'm doing THAT right? My processor though could use twice that much RAM.

Edited January 26, 2024 by InDarkestNight

[HeyYou]

The 1030 is NOT a 'gaming' card. Its a low level business grade vid card. Not much better than integrated graphics.

[InDarkestNight]

Well, I decided to actually buy stuff. I bought the i7-7700, thermal paste, and 2 8gb ram cards (that's not going to matter for Skyrim, but its better to be safe than sorry). It did recommend a fan to me, but I already got a fan on my cpu so I don't THINK I'll need it. Besides, it may be better if I stick to the one I got because it clearly can screw into my motherboard (I did have issues getting the new ssd in, I had to turn the cable upside down and snake it in a very unusual way, oh and we put it in backwards first try). According to amazon, the ram is going to arrive first, followed by the thermal paste, THEN the processor. So right now, my main concern is figuring out how to properly put the ram in. Hoping I can find into on my motherboard. If it matters, I have 4 slots and 2 ram mods right now, though one has noticeably less ram than the other. Though come to think of it, I do still have the original box. Assuming I can dig it out, maybe it has some written instructions in it.

[7531Leonidas]

IIRC, some (many?) motherboards require you to put the ram sticks in alternating slots (|_|_), NOT (||__).  Just check the information carefully.

[InDarkestNight]

That is actually the way mine came set up. Of course, since I'll be filling the other slots, this may not matter. However, they're not all the same size! Do they have to go in some order based on how much data they can hold? And no, I don't know how much the two I have in there are. I just know that one clearly has far fewer chips on it than the other. How can 8 gb be divided into those if they're not equal in size? What, is one 6gb or something?

[HeyYou]

There are paired slots. A1, A2, B1, B2. you want identical ram sticks in A1, and A2, same for the B's.

[RomanR]

If you already had 8GB in two slots, additional 16GB kit (2x8 GB) in rest of two will you give 24GB in total. Also RAM slots on the motherboard are often colored differently to avoid mistakes placing RAM kits in wrong slots (my has two slots colored in grey and black for example). 

If your old RAM isn't made by identical modules, it doesn't matter how they look like. It's their parametres (same capacity, timings and frequency) which dictates their use together as a kit. As 2100/2400MHz should be within JEDEC specs, every added kit should work. Still, using different RAM sticks together is a little suspisious. Any worthy technician would use a true kit to avoid possible problems.

[InDarkestNight]

I'm questioning how much of a diffence this new processor is actually going to make. Its processing speed is only 1/3 faster than my current one, even though that website is showing a 25% improvement. When I tried ICBINE (due to me not being able to run enb), it made every loading screen go through 4 1/2~5 messages before it loaded. That was pretty awful, in fact it was about as bad as me playing with my Relic Hunter load order. Imagine both those things stacking? A 1/3 decrease would only reduce the number of messages each loading screen went through to about 3~4. That hardly seems worth a $200 investment. I don't think it buffing my graphics card is going to help either. I wasn't getting any fps loss, the problem was the loading screens and I seemed to be suffering mild lag. I think my processor was struggling to emulate ICBINE's dll files. Yeah, it worked fine, but I don't see it as safe for me to play with it. Every time I went through a loading screen, I thought that my game had locked up it took so long. Though setting my computer to 'performance' mode did result in a minor increase in performance, and even reduced the loading screens a bit with ICBINE. Still, I doubt this 'new' processor is going to make much of a difference for me. I probably need to stick to lighting mods and retexturing things that will be up front and center all the time. Its the best I can do. Besides, it is possible to get a lot of the look of an enb simply through texture mods (I did notice on SE that enbs did seem to up my texture quality strangely). Of course, all the videos I can find for that are on SE, and you obviously won't get things like detailed shadows. Guess I'll be sticking with Vivid Weathers, since that seems to be the closest I can get to an enb that doesn't wreck my precious performance. Besides, recording myself is surely going to eat up more, so I don't have much to spare.

[7531Leonidas]

IIRC, loading screen times are most affected by hard drive speed (SSD vs HDD), graphics card (speed AND ram) and amount and speed of RAM on the motherboard.  A 12 GB graphics card MIGHT make a lot of difference there, when combined with more ram on the MB.

Processor speed and task processing times are at best inverse, so a 1/3 increase in speed = 1/(1 1/3) = 3/4, or 75% of the slower processor.  Can be much less improvement.