SO I am thinking about buying a rig so i cn play skyrim with the best settings and the HD pack, any advice for someone who has been a 360 gamer for the last ten years????? And im not getting alienware....id rather spend that money on a car, lol.

Build the rig, dont buy the rig. Go to the tech forum in general community discussion for help. You can max Sky for 500-550 bucks if you want, maybe even less.

I believe it was already moved there........

Still, I am 100 percent clueless on this stuff....so any advice would be great. Im not just looking to max, im looking to max AND play the HD texture pack without any hiccups.

For one you do not need i7 proc, i5 is max that you could get (there is no visible boost in today's games between running on i5 and i7) , but I seriosuly can see the diffrence I have the standard dual core 3GHz and Skyrim runs fine with every HD pack avaible (texture pack combiner). As for VRam - this is the cake you need top notch. As for me I have GForce 560 Titanium and it's marvelous. Also you need RAM (DDR3) 4gb will give you hiccups and CTDs with 8GB you will be good to go.

The poster above is right, you won't want any more than an i5, and you'll want 8GB RAM. Make sure you get a decent power supply so you don't fry your parts. You could install the game to an SSD, that'd really speed up loading screens and I think it might help with texture pop-in too. My build's in my sig, I haven't got Skyrim but I'm sure it'd run it fine, it runs everything else on maximum settings.

SSDs are really overkill unless you absolutely have to have that super fast load time. Sporting a Western Digital Caviar 1TB 7200 RPM drive and load times are about 2 to 3 seconds, sometimes 5 with that being the max. There's nothing wrong with going towards the i7 route, but an i5 will do the job nicely.

I do agree that you will want 8 gigs, but you can probably get away with 6. Though 8 gigs seems to be the minimum as of late.

PSU wise you will want atleast 650w maybe 700w, but anything beyond 700w is overkill. Think my ATI Radeon 7970 recommends a 600 to 650w PSU, running off 1 channel having a 150w supply with an 8pin connector.

I picked up my Samsung 830 128GB for ￡79 or something with the installation kit, I'd say it was worth it for the improved boot time alone. But yeah, otherwise not really essential.

There's no reason not to get 8GB of RAM - it's dirt cheap.

The most important factor in how well Skyrim runs will be your graphics card. I have a 2GB 560 ti and I run it at 1920 x 1080 with the HD texture pack and a bunch of graphics mods installed, and I get between 40 and 60 FPS. Never any slowdown. It's installed on a WD Caviar Black, and load times are a couple of seconds, max.

If you're new to making a new computer, you could wait around and buy some HP, Acer, et cetera brand desktop (on sale) that has decent components from any old Futureshop, Staples, and so on store

Or, you could spend a month learning about how to build a computer: what parts to get, how to put them together... It would be quite the learning experience, and also very rewarding. Also, the computer would be customized to yours needs, which you will have trouble getting in the first option. I definitely recommend doing this, even if its not your thing

Would hardly take a month to learn how to put it together. The main issues are deciding what parts you want and making abso-freaking-lutely sure that they are all compatible with each other.

Should take maybe an afternoon to put the first rig together, and most of that is spent figuring out what to not touch and making sure everything is plugged in correctly.

Trust this guy, it's the best advice you'll ever get, if you build a PC, it'll be pretty cheap.