Just saw your post...

look at this...yes im excited!

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/page-261868_29_600.html

it will point you to just about what your looking for, (im on Page 13)...great place to start looking for overclocking!

Thank you for the link, i will give it a read.

I decided to go with the 2g 560ti just for the extra vram and its only $20 more, which leaves me with my last question (i hope)

SSD or HDD - i like the vertex SSD i listed but its kinda small so i would have to watch how much i put on it, would the increased performance of an SSD outweigh dealing with the small size compared to my other option which would be a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 7200rpm ? (larger model SSD's tend to go over my price limit so i went with the 120g)

I have read that Skyrim load times with a good SSD are very short and gameplay is generally smoother.

Upgrading from a 460 to a 560 to is a waste especially with the new nvidia tech coming out in the late spring. Also Intel Ivy Bridge is launching in April.

If you want to upgrade, do it then. At the very least you will see price drops across the board and Skyrim will actually look and work well by that time. After the community finishes Betheda's work.

I'd agree with Tempura, I wouldn't recommend going to a 560 ti when you already have a 460. It's an upgrade for sure, but im my opinion not worth the money it would cost:

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/28691-nvidia-geforce-gtx-560-ti-vs-gtx-460-1gb-clocks/?page=2

Those are some Benchmarks you can check.

As for SSD vs HDD, most people who have an SSD also have a regular HD. Put Windows and maybe your two most played games on your Solid State, and use the HD for storage or games you play once and a while and don't really care about fast load times. The SSDs are to small and expensive to use for any kind of storage, but the performance? It's awesome. My main computer has a SSD for Windows and Skyrim and the performance is much better over my 2nd machine with a regular HD. I mean, FPS is no different, but there is almost 0 drive load stutter on Skyrim with my SSD, Windows boots really fast, runs smooth as butter, and it's kind of neat not hearing the *click* your HD makes all the time.

I hear the ssd's are fast (make sure you get the vertex 2 or equivalent) Im using a 500 gb seagate 6 tb sec transfer. prolly not as fast, but my loads are very fast still.

im using serious hd, real water, and flora textures. with new patch getting 40 to 60 fps on ultra

....read read read, before you buy anything. if theres a micro center close, go there and prob the hell out of them, and the other customers. you will learn alot!

Upgrading from a 460 to a 560 2gb is not a waste at all. The 768mb Vram limit on the 460 will limit your capability when it comes to modding Skyrim. Believe me, these mods eat a ton of Vram. You won't be able to even do 8X AA.

Second, I recommend dropping the 800w PSU and keeping the 600W if you don't plan to SLI your 560 ti. 600W power supply, if it isn't old/dying, will work fine.

Put the saved money from the power supply toward the i5 2500k Sandy Bridge. Believe me, Intel cpus are superior in so many ways, plus that CPU overclocks to very impressive extents (something like 4.5 ghz). I went from AMD to Intel and never looked back.

Mother board, whatever you want... HDD doesn't play a huge role in performance.

You can find 6 gigs of 1600 mhz DDR3 for like what? 30$?

Good luck with your new rig!

This sounds a lot more like what i was thinking. The 560ti 2g is a bit faster and has more than twice the vram which i would like for modding as i have already hit the max my 460 can push.

I have thought about running the 560 with my 460 in SLI but im not sure it would be worth it or even offer much more performance, i also thought of useing the 460 as a dedicated physX card but not sure if that would offer any more performance either so i would stick with the single 560 im sure.

The only reason im getting a new PSU is because i plan to keep my current pc mostly intact for my kids to use.

Getting a 560 is a waste. Skyrim is primarily a CPU dependent game. You can waste money on the 560 if you want but if you don't have a good CPU like a 2500k you won't see much performance gain. And when you do get the 2500k, crank it up to 4.5ghz because those mods will be very taxing.

As far as mods go, less is more. You don't need quadruple resolution texture mods because visually they offer little. Is a flock of butterflies at four times the extra res pretty? No. You won't be able to tell. Point proven.

Look at mods in order of importance. Color and lighting (shadows are part o this) make massive differences. Then draw distance to fix that muddy far away land. Already a decent mod that rebuilds that. Then trees and repairing the muddy looking distance trees. And lastly texture mods.

Yea i think i am going to go with a i5 2500k setup rather than the AMD x4 setup as its only about $100 more and well worth it im sure.

As for the GPU issue, if i build a new pc and decide to leave the 460GTX in the current system and get a new card, i would go for a 560 rather than looking for another 460, its great performance for its price compared to the 580 and the 2g 560 model is only $20 more than the Oc 1g model.

With the GTX 460 768mb, you can run on ultra, however, your ability to apply anti aliasing is very limited. And this is before even installing any texture/Visual mods. Sure the computing power of the 460 is magnificent to behold, but, like I said, you keep running into that Vram limit. You cannot even run the Skyrim HD Lite version and maintain adequate anti aliasing without feeling the effects. I honestly don't think you've even tested Skyrim with the GTX 460 768mb, while I have done so extensively, and the OP will more than likely confirm my results.

Further, most of my testing with mods has shown that the GPU takes as much of a hit or even greater than the CPU, if they alter the graphics in any way. So, getting a great GPU is not a waste at all, trust me.

However, I do agree with you that having a powerful CPU is a huge player in tweaking your Skyrim experience, especially when it comes to loading more grids, and draw distances. Which is why I recommend getting that 2500k. It's a great chip and you will certainly not regret it.

Yea i am for sure going with the i5 2500k build, now i just have to decide if i want the super fast 120g OCZ vertex 3 SSD or larger and cheaper 500gb 7200rpm 32mb sata 6.0g WD Caviar Black HDD. (wish i could get both but no go)

For your future reference. You cannot SLI two different cards, they must be the same.

The 2500k is a great chip, mines been singing along at 4.6ghz from day 1.
You will need an after market cooler if you plan on OCing the 2500k.

I use WD Caviar Black drives, 500gb and 1tb. Great drives.
I thought about SSD when I built my rig and storage capacity won out over speed.
Once you install windows and it patches itself 100 times and then you install some must have apps and a few games that 120g isnt going to last long and you will end up buying a larger drive anyway.

Yea i was thinking of going with a Cooler master V8, it looks good plus i don't want to get into water cooling.

The 120g does sound like it will be full very fast so i will go with a 500g WD instead.

The Noctua NH-D14 air block heatsink has been bar non the best rated and performing heatsink for the 1155 socket CPUs for a while, comes with very high praise. I can also relate from real experience with a 120GB SSD that yah it ain't enough but I figured that so my strategy has been to install all my games and progs etc onto my HDDs and then shift the folders of the game de jour that I'm playing (Skyrim for instance right now) over to the SSD where the OS & my desktop folders etc also live. Lots of space, everything I'm curently 'doing' is very fast and the rest is still on larger albiet slower storage methods.

ED: Oh and shifting to a 2GB 560? Yah Skyrim does love its vram so that's good for the game for sure.

ha... funny how you mention the noctua NH-D14... considering i am currently using that on my rig..

The thing is giagantic and although fits the 2011 socket boards amazingly well.... left me very little room in my case to fit the side panel on (it fits.. but i betcha i couldn't get another 1/8-1/4 inch of something between...)

The only issue i'm having is that the fans continuously keep a super ultra low RPM resulting in the ASUS board having a fit that my CPU fans have failed..... funny.... i think i've gotten them stable at about 500rpm.. they were running 300rpm.... i'm got them maxed out .... waiting on a solution.. noctua didn't help me at all, blamed it on asus....

whatever don't care... plenty of air moving in my case i could probably remove the fans and run passively just fine.

either way.... give you a brief idea of how it all looked as it came out of the box and as i started assembling it ..

not massive scroll forever photos.. just 1280x960 or something images..

Heatsink makes a full sized 2011 socket board look like a micro ATX lol.... and trust me.. the socket is massive compared to the 1366/1155/1156 sockets.... like holy crap huge..

http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/5459/lga20111.jpg
http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/2808/lga20112.jpg
http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/3803/lga20113.jpg
http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/8178/lga20114.jpg
http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/1434/lga20115.jpg
http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/8674/lga20116u.jpg
http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/1162/lga20117.jpg
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/9136/lga20118.jpg
http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/6866/lga20119.jpg
http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/7899/lga201110.jpg
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/5308/lga201111.jpg
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/6326/lga201112.jpg
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/184/lga201113.jpg

1. What is the resolution OP plays on
2. What OP considers comfortable FPS
3. What other settings OP considers necessary(AA, AF, etc.)

Without these questions answered all advice here is pretty much blind.

I liked the look of them too until I saw how massive it really was and at the time it was not going to fit in my case.

I got an Antec H20 60 and couldnt be happier with it.
It was as easy as an air cooler to install, looks neat and is a lot quieter than those big air coolers.

It was more of a generalized question about increased performance with a quad 3.0 over a dual 3.0 everything else was just building specs, also i said i play on Ultra with shadows on high, which means full AA/AF. I also mentioned i have a few mods and driver tweaks, i will list them, though i don't think it really has any reflection on the current topic and how its shifted.

8x AA ( in game) --- actually i checked and u have in game AA turned down to x4

For driver tweaks I have

Performance AO,
4x Transparancy Supersampling
and 16x High quality AF (in game AF off)

for mods i have

Realistic Colors and nights 1.6
Realistic water textures
Vurts flora textures (med res)
Enhanced night sky
Enhanced distant terrain
Quality map with roads


I thought about putting in Skyrim HD 2k but as was mentioned by someone else i just don't think i have the extra Vram for even the lite version, and second i think most textures in Skyrim are just fine, i only did the flora textures cause they were horrible up close. Currently i stay at or above 30 FPS for the most part and imo anything 30+ is perfect.

I still think, if sticking with my current build, that upgrading to a 3.0 quad core and Win 7 x64 would be very cheap and effective for the system and should show at least slight increased performance in Skyrim compared to it currently.



Back to coolers, i agree that the V8 is huge, i think it would fit in my case but im not sure so i may go with the V6 or the NH-D14 instead. I know its because i know nothing about water cooling, but just the thought of putting water in my system makes me shudder.

Edit- After looking over my choices in cooling and checking out some ...water cooling, it turns out the Corsair H80 is a very good cooler, very easy to install and maintenance free, its already pre-filled and never needs refilling, also its smaller than most air coolers so it shouldn't get in the way of many other parts. I may jump into liquid cpu cooling after all.

Thank's for the pic's, really gives me a good look at what it will be like and wow that thing is big, nice vertical case also. In my current build is a micro ATX board in a in win Dragon Slayer mid tower case so i cant imagine how huge it would look in that setup. For the new build i think i will go with a Cooler Master HAF 922 mid tower case.

( i planed to get the background from the Skyrim launcher airbrushed on the side on my dragon slayer case, fitting eh !)

I have never seen a vertical-mount case before! Cool!
Though thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense - especially if you are going to be fitting a big heatsink to your GPU(s).

I have a similar case - the Silverstone Fortress FT02. After trying out this style of case, I don't think I'll ever go back to anything else...no dust inside, and easily air cooled. And so much room...I can shove my mother-in-law in there.

Why not just repurpose your old drive and use it in conjunction with your SSD? You'll still be able to install 2-3 large 10-20GB games on a 120GB SSD after Windows 7 is installed and fully updated (~45GB). If there's nothing else that's obviously deficient in your system, SSDs will generally provide the most noticeable improvement to overall system performance. I'd consider it the most noticeable upgrade after CPU and GPU from both a day-to-day usage aspect and gaming aspect.

As for managing space, I do similar to what BumpintheNight suggested. Just move games you are currently playing on and off your SSD and make junctions to them. This preserves the registry/installation/file structure and allows you to maximize the benefit of your SSDs for the games you're currently playing the most.

HDDs are expensive now because of the floods in Thailand, just use your old one for now imo, wait til they're dirt cheap again, and buy a 1-2TB model for < 10 cents/gb when they're cheap again.

If i do opt to build the new system i want to keep the old system as intact as possible for my kids to use, my wife already has an awesome laptop but my kids currently share a very very old intel pc so keeping the current system intact is prefered. The only thing i plan to take out of my current build to put into the new one is my SB X-Fi Titanium Champ Series sound card, the old system will be just fine on onboard sound. I will probably go with the 500g WD for now as its still $50 cheaper than the OCZ 120g SSD and just plan to get the OCZ SSD later on and use it as mentioned.


Edit- Or another option i could go with is get the 120g OCZ SSD now and only install the OS and my top games i plan to play now which would be Skyrim, Battlefield 3, Saints Row 3, and Maybe KoA:Reckoning . I think there could be enough room for this, then later grab the 500g WD for extra space to hold all my other games/mod downloads etc etc.

But maybe pushing the 120g space too close ....Just a thought.

get 2x 120gb ssds.... and don't worry about it?

yes i'm quite fond of my silverstone Raven 02 case....

the design has it's little quirks.. but otherwise dust wise and airflow.. not to mention how damn quiet it is.... does make it the ultimate case.

I had a coolermaster cosmos prior to that which was quiet.. and had a much better hardrive mounting system which was slick..

The only way i would move to something else is if someone makes a better case with a better idea that somewhat follows the same idea.

I have never gotten better temperature readings and cooling capacity.. like i said.... essentially silent.. even while running a encoding process taking several hours with 100% cpu load and gpu load..... silent.