I have 16 gig of memory on my PC (don't ask, in the bizarre world of the RAM market it was actually cheaper to by more, faster RAM).

Are there any modifications that would make use of this RAM overkill? Are there Ini. tweaks anyone is aware of? I had read something regarding memory allocation for specific aspects of the game but now I can't find it.

Just wondered. I appreciate any assistancr or suggestions.

No. Skyrim is a 32-bit program. It cannot use more than 4 GB of RAM.

It can if you utilize a ram-disk. See: http://www.gamesas.com/skyrim-ramdisk-step-step-instructions-t162914.html

For the record, I've never used it myself so I won't guarantee anything. Good luck!

I personally doubt a ram-drive is going to enhance very much. I base this upon my own system where I got an SSD drive, which is really fast yet it doesn't improve much in terms of loading speeds of Skyrim.

That's not "Skyrim using more than 4GB of RAM," that's "using your extra RAM as a hard disc drive.

It might very well be a nifty plan for someone with 16GB of RAM, but your language is misleading.

Are you playing the same setup on a magnetic disc to compare load times, or are you just guessing/assuming?

Well, I base this upon just having changed the harddrive. I can't really say I've noticed much improvement when it comes to loading speed (in Skyrim). Now, Windows startup is very fast, but Skyrim, nope, can't tell much difference.

Welp, there go my plans to get a SSD when I next upgrade

LOL, glad I could help. But there are other advantages to the SSD though, and it's that your whole system suddenly feels faster, and some games really make use of it too, I just don't know why Skyrim isn't improved as much. Having said all that though, In my own situation where I got most of my games on STEAM, you got the problem that you can't install the game on a normal harddrive, and since SSD are expensive and small, you're going to be annoyed. I want the games that really need speed on the SSD, and the other games on my "vanilla" drive. Having to move them manually just isn't worth the hassle. But, that's a STEAM problem, and people are rioting about it on their forums, rightly so

I personally saw a dramatic difference in SSD vs conventional HDD regarding Skyrim. While I get loading screens for about 10-20 seconds if Skyrim is on a mechanical HDD, on SSD I get about 1-3 seconds max (not enough time to read the text!). And this is a pretty modest setup, considering that it's a SATA 3 SSD and my aging PC only supports SATA 2, so I'm getting only about half of the actual SSD speeds. While running Skyrim from a SSD I also get much faster 'transitions' between cells.

Using a RAM disk of about 8-12 GB size (enough to put a moderately modded Skyrim installation) would result in those same benefits, only better. Because a normal HDD gives you about 100-150 MB/s, SSDs give 500-560 MB/s and a RAM disk gives about 4-5 GB/s read speeds! I'm not kidding, just try to run a benchmarking utility on a ram disk and see for yourself.

Symlinks are your friend. I've got half a dozen of those set up for various stuff that wants to be on my SSD, but can't due to space issues (got a really small one). Google should help you to figure out how to set those up.

I moved my Steam installation from my SSD to my magnetic hard drive and my Skyrim load times are now much, much slower.

ssd is the biggest upgrade you can do to your pc besides pcu/gpu.

Totally. Agreed. I tell this to all my friends too. At least a small one for the OS.