I’ve read as much as I can in the stickied topic but looking for some down to earth advice. I was a PC gamer back in the late nighties and switched to XBOX 8 years ago. Skyrim is making me wish I owned a gaming PC again. Do you think I could find one for 1G that could run it on Ultra? Where should I shop? Thanks for any tips!

What resolution 1920x1080 ?

How much anti-aliasing ? What type of anti-aliasing ? MSAA is nicer, FXAA is uglier, but faster. 4xMSAA would be good, I think. Do you also want transparency AA ? You can get 16xAF easily, it doesn't cost much. But what about Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) ? It's very nice to have it.

What framerates do you want ? 60 fps at all time ? Or do you not mind to dip below at some spots (like at the stairs in White Run).

What country do you live ? The world is big.

What is 1G ? 1K ? 1K what ? Euros ? Dollars ? What kind of dollars ? US dollars ?


You gotta be specific, or you will get useless answers.

Before you answer, the only thing I can say is, building your own desktop is the cheapest. And if you've never done it, it's a lot easier than you might think. Many US people buy their PC components at newegg.com. Good prices, and a huge variety of stuff you can buy. (You can basically buy any component there). Have a look. For a small fee, they might even assemble the PC before they ship it to you.

One more suggestion.
This would be my gaming machine.

1) CPU - Intel i5-3570k. Released end of April. $225.
2) Any Z77 motherboard. $100
3) 8GB of RAM, ~$40
4) Proper PSU, lots of choices. $50
5) Case. $50-$100.
6) HDD. SSD. DVD-burner. Varies on sizes. Roughly $50-$100.
7) The graphics card. Most important part. $200 will get you a nice gtx560ti. $500 will get you top, gtx680.

To summarize. For $750 you'll have a PC with a gtx560ti (or equivalent AMD card). It'll be a very fast PC. And excellent at playing games. I think you can play Skyrim on Ultra at 1080p with 4xAA.
For $1050 you'll have a machine with a gtx680. Basically the fastest gaming machine money can buy today. It'll play Skyrim with all eyecandy you throw at it, texture packs, 8xMSAA+Transparancy AA + high SSAO, etc. Definitely worth the money, I bought a gtx680 last week (500 euros) and I love it. In 3 weeks, the new Intel CPUs will be released, and I'll buy a 3570k myself. My machine will be awesome.

I recently helped a friend buy an Acer laptop for 900 dollars which should run Skyrim on at least medium settings.

If you want to buy a PC that will run Skyrim on ultra-mega-super-settings, with mods, and not a single bit of slowdown then you're going to need to invest a lot more than 1,000 USD. But you could reasonably design and buy a PC from a custom computer manufacturer for $1,000 USD or a little bit more and get a computer that will run Skyrim on high settings with only minor hiccups.

LOL, I have no idea what most of that stuff is. I do know I live in the US. I think I’ll have to contend with what I have now (xbox) until I’ve had time to research and learn what all this is. Maybe I can plan for a gaming PC by the time all the DLC’s are out (Game of the Year edition) or something...

I would rather wait and be able to run on Ultra than have a medium setting PC... might as well just stick the xbox if I’m not going for gold right?

If you can build you own PC about 1,200 American if not around 1,800 American to ensure a solid Ultra with mods and texture packs etc. and quality hardware all around....if you want to go budget you might be able to bring that down a bit.
The keys are: 64 bit Win 7, Solid Graphics Card with a good amount of VRAM (1.5 GB or more) 256 bus or better and a power supply that can run a card like that (approx quality 550 watt or better), 7,200 RPM quality brand HDD or a Solid State Drive, Quad Core CPU pref sandy bridge Intel unlocked processor or a Phenom II and 4 GB or more of RAM. If you can hold off 6 months prices would be quite a bit lower for this stuff.

I can far exceed Ultra with the rig in my signature which iBuypower made for me custom if you don't want to build it on your own and install the OS etc.
I would advise Nvidia over ATI for graphics cards in regard to Skyrim as they have SSAO functionality.

I would say that you can get away with a cheaper 1GB graphics card and investing in more RAM. DDR3 ram is dirt cheap these days, so why not go for 12GB or 16GB? Skyrim won't be able to use more than 3.5GB of ram, but the extra ram serves as extra VRAM which makes running HD texture packs so much easier. From my personal experience, upgrading from 4gb to 12gb ram meant that I could run a combination of large 2048x2048 texture mods without any kind of stutter or FPS hit. Besides, Skyrim is CPU-limited in many ways, so it's not like a cheap graphics card will really hurt performance.

Ummm no,system ram is generally much slower than vram,and thus using it instead of vram will result in hicupps and bad framerate.Besides,i think getting 12 GB of RAM is overkill so he should probably save that money for a better video card.

Yep the game won't use more than 4GB tops thus anything over a common 6 GB RAM config is pretty much overkill for Skyrim.

Well, you can use that overkill RAM for RAMdrive, pretty much eliminates stutter due to disk access (or so they say, I don't have RAM drive myself)

But a better GPU is worth more than 6 GB useless* RAM, I agree

*if you do have use of 12GB RAM, then it's not useless

In my experience, subtle stuff like distant shadows, ambient occlusion, and stuff are only noticeable if you're the type that likes to take screenshots or walk from Solitude to Windhelm, Riften, Falkreath and simply enjoy the sceneries.

If you're the type that likes to go adventuring rather than screenshooting, then less than Ultra should be enough. What I'm saying is if you won't really notice all the subtle changes given by the extra stuff from Ultra (that is, distant shadows, ambient occlusion, anti aliasing, etc) then you don't have to push yourself to spend your money on the best of the best hardware

Last summer I bought a PC from the Dell Outlet online for about $750 plus tax. It is a I7-2600 with 8 GB RAM and a AMD 5770 1GB video card. It runs Skyrim on Ultra without a problem. I also have about 27 mods installed, mostly textures or graphical. I do use the lite versions of mods if they offer it to be safe. I have not checked my FPS, but it runs smoothly without stuttering or ripping.

Edit: I should mention my monitor is only 19 inches at 1440 x 900 so if you had a much bigger screen the 5770 might not be powerful enough for the higher resolution at ultra, I don't know.

Sure but for instance when I had my rig built my 16 GB of Corsair Vengeance was given to me at the price of 8 GB(4 GB sticks) which would have been fine on its own. Tons of RAM is great but for Skyrim 6 to 8 GB (pretty much the standard for gaming builds these days) will be plenty for the game, AERO and anything else you might have running.

Well then there ya go spend another 500 to 700 and the best you will see is better AA and AF etc. which are just added effects......I had a Dell XPS that I used for gaming for about 7 years but they really aren't "gaming PC's" and I did have to upgrade a bit more often than I would have if I had built something out of the exact hardware that I wanted down to the wiring.

Just to throw in my two cents in case the OP is still looking here...

I'm running an almost 2 year old Dell Studio XPS i7 with 6gigs of RAM and an Nvidia GTX 260 (2gig VRAM) video card. I just bought a decent 1920x1080 monitor in the post-Christmas sales, and I'm now running Skyrim Ultra in that resolution with the High-Res pack and piles of mods. Like Oestred, I mostly pick the medium/lite versions of mods (except stuff for my character since I play in 3rd person; HD for that stuff) to be on the safe side, but it all runs great. Sometimes the framerate dips a little, but since this isn't a shooter it's far from unplayable.

The system in my sig is running Skyrim on ultra and I only run one add on, the HD texture pack. no issues. Most of my system is 5 years old...

It depends on the resolution of your monitor and whether you need to run at constant 60fps or, say 40-60fps.

Most of the Skyrim graphics settings have very little or no effect on frame rate. The only setting that significantly drags down frame rate is anti-aliasing. If you can live with FXAA instead of MSAA, then you can get a much higher frame rate with a weaker GPU, even if all the other settings are maxed. http://geforce.com/optimize/guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide/#1goes into great detail about how much each setting affects frame rate.

There are a number of desktop graphics cards available in the $70-150 range that can run Skyrim on Ultra settings at 1920x1080.

And if u r looking to run skyrim on a PC, its best to get a desktop. Dont think about getting a laptop, because its gonna overheat badly