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GPU for for heavily modded Skyrim


tommau5

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I'm buying a new rig in a couple of weeks and I'm wondering if an HD 7970 3GB GHz edition (will be overclocked) will be suitable to run Skyrim with a lot of mods and all of the 'eye candy' mods, i.e 2k textures, ENBs, realistic water etc. I know that it can handle it on max settings but there doesn't seem to be much info out there on GPUs good for playing modded games.

 

The rest of the rig if it helps:

i5-3570k @ 3.4 (probably OC to about 4-4.2)

8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR-3 1600

Will be playing at 1920x1080

 

Cheers for any advice.

 

PS Sorry if this is in the wrong section and if this question gets asked a lot but the search function didn't bring up anything helpful.

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seems to be a good idea. I'm using the GTX 670 4GB superclocked w/ backplate, flawless in every way :D

 

Nice, I was considering a 670 4GB or 680 2GB but I've heard that Skyrim will chew up all the VRAM you throw at it and 2GB may not be enough. What kind of FPS do you get with lots of mods then?

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seems to be a good idea. I'm using the GTX 670 4GB superclocked w/ backplate, flawless in every way :D

 

Nice, I was considering a 670 4GB or 680 2GB but I've heard that Skyrim will chew up all the VRAM you throw at it and 2GB may not be enough. What kind of FPS do you get with lots of mods then?

 

Grab a GTX 680 4GB and you should be set, i've heard you get decent fps with it.

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A GTX 680 would be a lot more expensive though. I dont remember the FPS I was getting, but let's just say it didn't even hiccup with MAX settings+HD mods. And skyrim on an SSD, A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE IN LOAD TIMES.

 

(i'm at college... missing my desktop </3)

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Grab a GTX 680 4GB and you should be set, i've heard you get decent fps with it.

 

I would but they're about £100 more and I'm stretching my budget as it is. From what I understand the HD 7970 GHz is outperforming the 680 in most areas anyway. I just wanted an Nvidia card for physx, which isn't worth £100 more if you ask me ;) lol. If the 3GB 7970 GHz will do then I'll go for it. The 4GB version of the 670 is about the same price with slightly lower performance, however if the extra vRAM helps significantly (?) then I will go for that instead.

 

A GTX 680 would be a lot more expensive though. I dont remember the FPS I was getting, but let's just say it didn't even hiccup with MAX settings+HD mods. And skyrim on an SSD, A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE IN LOAD TIMES.

 

Beat me to it lol. Load screens don't bother me too much tbh; I was a console gamer before. ;) That sounds like pretty impressive performance with the 670. :)

Edited by tommau5
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I personally feel that a 7970 might be overkill. I run the TCP (full works), an ENB, WATER etc... on an MSI 660Ti with 2GB of VRAM with no problems at all. I usually sit around 40 fps.

 

On that basis, I would say that even if you want to best of everything a 670 would do you well. As a comparison the rest of my machine is very similar to yours. @Korodic's suggestion of an SSD is not a bad Idea though if you have some extra money to blow. Load times can get painfully slow on a conventional HDD.

 

Whatever you decide I hope you enjoy! :)

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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.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I personally feel that a 7970 might be overkill. I run the TCP (full works), an ENB, WATER etc... on an MSI 660Ti with 2GB of VRAM with no problems at all. I usually sit around 40 fps.

 

On that basis, I would say that even if you want to best of everything a 670 would do you well. As a comparison the rest of my machine is very similar to yours. @Korodic's suggestion of an SSD is not a bad Idea though if you have some extra money to blow. Load times can get painfully slow on a conventional HDD.

 

Whatever you decide I hope you enjoy! :)

 

Well based on that information and some benchmarks I looked at, I agree that a 7970 would be overkill if I only planned on playing Skyrim, which is not the case. I'm glad I'll be able to run all it with all of the eye candy though, since that (among some other things) is what tipped me over the edge and made me upgrade my rig :P

 

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.

 

Thanks for that man, very informative. In the end I went with a Sapphire Vapor-X HD 7970 and I'll be building my rig in a couple of days. I bought an Antec case with plenty of room for water cooling so that's something I'll consider.

 

Also, I guess I may as well ask in this thread instead of starting another.. which visual mods would you guys specifically recommend to experience this game to the fullest? Some of the screenshots from ENB mods are just incredible :ohmy: particularly Sharpshooters and a cinematic lighting mod that I can't remember the name of lol.

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