Xaikarik Posted January 15, 2013 Share Posted January 15, 2013 Ok I'm building a computer on the cheap and wanted you guys opinion on it, I'm new to computer building so bare with me The SPEC is Phenom II quad core 3.3 8 gb of ddr3 ram 1600ATI hd6600 onboard gfx (planning to upgrade to a 2gb NVIDIA gt650)500gb hdd SATA I do eventually plan a better gfx card and 16gb of ram, and the OS is windows 8 pro, just wondered what you guys think skyrim might run like and how high my settings will go :) Please be gentle as I've never built a machine before Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xaikarik Posted January 15, 2013 Author Share Posted January 15, 2013 I forgot to mention the on board card is 1gb of shared memory ( and that I've already checked I can bypass and disable the onboard card for a dedicated one :) ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ilikecheese1337 Posted January 15, 2013 Share Posted January 15, 2013 That should run Skyrim on High fairly easily, and you'd even be OK with HD mods. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FiftyTifty Posted January 15, 2013 Share Posted January 15, 2013 Only thing that is holding you back is your GPU. Everything else is AOK. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xaikarik Posted January 15, 2013 Author Share Posted January 15, 2013 Will the 2gb card fix that ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FiftyTifty Posted January 15, 2013 Share Posted January 15, 2013 Uh. No. A better card will. Like the 6850. Or the 7770. Or the 6950. Or the 5850. Or the 5870. or the 6770. Or the 7850. Or th-You get the idea. At this point in time, 1GB vram is fine, supposing you aren't going above 1080p. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brandy1123 Posted January 16, 2013 Share Posted January 16, 2013 usually any graphics card ending with 60 or less is a not so good card. when you get down to 50 and some cases 40, you really are dealing with OEM cards that have been "magically" upgraded by the manufacturer or significantly fail at higher performance and are locked to work. The 70's and up are your performance cards. Some 60's are ok, but go look at shaders, cores and base clock speeds. you may find that some of these cards are boosted with overclocking already (thus part of the manufacturers magic) Try to not use a system for high end gaming the shares video memory. You lose some memory in the instruction translation but more importantly, valuable bandwidth as data needs to flow across the DMA and main bus. You also should insure your PCIe port is a 16x slot and not 2 shared for 8x. The Hard drive speed and access capability is usually not very good on generic prefab PC's. Look for a SSD drive or at least a hard drive with 32M cache and 7200RPM or better. Your memory will have numbers called (generically) latency. Like 24,24,24,8 (or others). Typically, the lower the better , but not exatcly a truth. For the layman, lower = better, usually means better performance. MAke sure you don,t skimp on your power supply. Stable and clean power ~20% greater then what you are required to have will give your power supply a long and fruitful life. A cheap power supply usually ends up not having good rectifiers or filters. Small ripples or voltage spikes over time will kill your system. The case is also important. know what cooling you are going to use and insure the cables do not interfere with air flow. Factory fans seldom have thte CF/m (cubic feet per minute) of airflow and are typically noisier then a day care. look for fans under 25Db (sound levels) and ultimately push a combinded volume of air approximately 200CF/m (preferably more and not counting the power supply fan, cpu fan, or GPU fan). The average fan being about 40. Insure the airflow is directional without fans fighting each other for flow or exhaust. Give the exhaust of your case space where you set it. If you have multiple hard drives, connect them on different channels so they dont fight for the SATA bus on that channel. Don't put a CD Drive on your game HD channel. Onboard sound shares the DMA channels, data bus and will swallow extra CPU clock cycles. A Sound card only needs an instruction sent and manages a lot of the digital number to sound crunching on its own. AS a final note - over clocking is more then just tweaking the main bus clock, the memory clock and upping your GPU a few extra Hz. If you truely dont understand what you are doing, what voltage, current, frequency and watts are especially in reference to heat, then my suggestion is to never do it. If, on the other hand, you take the time to learn why some speeds are multiples of others and what levels become unstable but not detrimental and what cooling really does, then by all means start cranking out performance while sumbmersed in mineral oil or bathed in liquid nitrogen ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bloodinfested Posted January 16, 2013 Share Posted January 16, 2013 Sounds fine to me I wouldn't waste your money on upgrading your onboard ram 8g is more then enough if you just game skyrim exe usage is caped at 4g. The ram that you should be concerned about is the video ram for high res textures use. I have 2.5g video ram you end up ctd when you cap it but it depends how much you want to mod skyrim.I would stay away from windows 8 I heard a few issues with it and games for the most part will not be based around it for sometime, vista and 7 is fine Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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