If I am running a lot of gameplay oriented mods, especially ones that add npc's, monsters, encounters and change AI. is it unwise for me to boost the ugrids to 7? is it best to leave this at 5?

I'll tell you what I do. I don't touch it, ever. My Skyrim is already on the verge of collapsing any minute due to the sheer number of mods I have installed; and I was careful. Modifying uGridToLoad is looking for troubles, really.

From most respected reports you shouldn't even use it if you used no mods Its probably even more foolhardy to use it in your case.

really, just leave it...there are so many other ways to make Skyrim look prettier without destabilizing your game

Ugrids tinkering = russian roulette.

Nooooo don't touch that, eveeeeeer.

Just incredibly not worth it. And should something occur, that ugrid settings is stuck in your saves. So if you want to recover a save by reverting to Ugrid=5, it's not a simple INI edit.

There are people who swear blind that it's fine (to 7, at least. Most people agree anything higher is risky). I used to have it at 7, but I turned it down when I noticed crashing. I'm still not sure if that was the cause, but given the fact that people have been known to have trouble even with 7, and the difficulty in reverting it back again, I'd say it's not worth it.

I learned myself not long ago that ugrids can, and does cause issues. In my case it was repeatable crashes in specific locations (The Rift and Falkreath). I was able to get around this issue by fast traveling past the trouble spots, but it was by no means a solution of any kind. It was only out of sheer frustration that I reverted it back to default. I now have a perfectly stable game even though it's modded to within an inch of it's life.

Honestly, it's a massive cause.

I had mine originally set at 11 and it was fine in Vanilla.

I then pushed it back down to 9 when I started installing mods and then finally I had mine set to ugrids7 as i kept getting crashes. I think a major contributor are all the scripts running from various mods.

Now i've got a pretty powerful pc (i7 3600 overclocked, 16gb RAM, GTX 680, SSD drives) and I now have mine set at 5. Haven't had a crash since and have a multitude of mods running

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12866 does a pretty darned good job of imulating ugrids 7, I use it and love it.

Nice, it says to work in conjunction with Enhanced Distant Terrain so I'll give this one a go.

Just be sure to give it a scrub with TES5Edit first. I'm seeing some stuff in the comments to that effect.

u grids to 7 or p to 9 doesn't cause much trubles , but you have to remember that your past save games will be unaivalable if you lower again the ugrids andmake your game ctd ...

I have set them to 9 and works fine so far , but I sugest a 7 because a 5 is too low and is more for the consolles ...

7 works fine for me... And despite what is reported above you CAN revert if necessary:

1. alt-tab out of your game (if you don't have any other apps open to alt-tab to, press control-alt-delete and start task manager which will get you back to windows)
2. open Skyrim.ini, modify ugridstoload=5, or whatever lower value you want. SAVE the file
3. alt-tab back into your game
4. open the console (~), type refreshini - this will reload the ini settings into Skyrim, with the lower ugrids value
5. close the console, save your game
6. restart Skyrim and load your game

I have never heard of that procedure, I am not planning of messing uGridToLoad but I'll write it down anyways, you never know.

The fact that it would introduce tons of game breaking bugs if modified in Oblivion/F3 shows that you should you still tread lightly whilst modifying it, even if it is a "usable" tweak in Skyrim. Overall it just causes more harm than is worth, you're pushing the engine to its absolute max as you're loading so many more references, scripts, AI packages and actors in memory at once.

I am running UGrids = 7 on my second playthrough. Have not noticed any UGrid related anomalies, so far.

Yes, you can revert UGrids back if issues present themselves. One of the Nvidia Skyrim tweak guides details how to set and revert UGrids also.

But as with any Skyrim modding techniques, your results may vary...