I am not playing Skyrim but plan to start soon. I will be using some of the higher texture mods and a few other plug ins.

My computer is win xp fully up to date, 4gb of memory His radeon 6850 turbo with an i5 Sandy Bridge choipset at 3.3 MHZ.

I already have a copy of Windows 7.

Does anyone know if xp or win 7 will likely give me better results? Specifically I am thinking about using
the 64 bit version because that is ablle to use a lot more ram. Would an increase in ram from
the 4gbs I have to say 8GB make any difference, I actually like my winxp setup but if more ram
would be good it would give me a reason to go ahead and move up to 64bit computing.

Would that be a good thing for the game or is the 4gb I am using now enough. (I have a feeling it
isn't if I am going to start adding things but what do the my fellow gamers think.

Many thanks for any opinions.

I believe Win 7 64bit gives the best performance.

Skyrim needs ram, especially for texture enhancement mods. 64bit OS is necessary.

And Win 7 because you can use your card to its actual potential, instead of being stuck in DX9 for everything

I only have 4GB ram installed at the moment, I can play on Ultra settings except AA turned down to 2x only - all other settings unchanged. I get a smooth ~50-60 fps...

My specs:

Win7 x64
i3 @3.3GHz
GTX 550Ti 1GB (slightly overclocked)
4GB ram

Hope this helps,

xTx

Not really necessary, but it does help. You just won't have sessions too long and can't use as many texture packs with a 32-bit OS.

Also, I find that 6 GB of RAM is a nice balance if you're not doing stuff like dev work or something. Just something to think about.

Good point, but try telling that to people with 32-bit OS and the official HD texture pack

I have, as you've seen.

You also know it hasn't gone too well when I tell them that. Got the technical manual now, though.

A word of warning, though. Going from a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit OS will require a clean install. So make sure you back everything up first.

Lol yep

Aye clean install needed mate. A few apps have 64bit versions now to which is good. Like winrar and Internet explorer. Firefox should follow suit soon, been in the night builds for ages.

Having started Skyrim with XP/32bit/4GB and (due to a HD crashed) now playing Win7/64bit/16GB I can offer one more reason to go for Win7: stability.

Under XP I was one of the many people who had constant CTDs, in some situations even after only some seconds of play, forcing me to play in windowed mode, to get an uninterrupted 15min of play. Under Win7 I'm still waiting for my first crash.

I do believe that my issues were DirectX-related as XP only does 9.0c and I had severe problems with some other games (BlackOps, MW3) throwing DirectX-errors. No such problems under Win7/DirectX11.

Performance has not noticably changed: 1920x1200 on Ultra with a GTX480 (now 580) had been smooth on XP, too (read: both rigs do 60FPS just fine).

So, considering that XP will never manage better than DirectX9, I think you'd be wise to choose Win7.

Regarding the upgrade procedure: you can move/copy your Steam folder to a safe place, install the OS (I'd buy a new HD , install the Steam client and just point it to the existing Steam directory. No need to reinstall any game.

Yup, 64bit OS and 6+ GB of Ram will do you good. Skyrim never ever crashes for me.

64 bit all the way

Windows 7 64 Bit and 8GB RAM if you intend to use the High Resolution Texture Pack and a few mods.

If you have a choice between the two, there is absolutely no reason not to use 64bit and every reason to use it.

...yeah and 8 gigs of ram is like $40!

I am part of the group that has nothing but a stable Skyrim experience. My rig is in my sig, the only crashes I get, which are few in number, have all been mod related. My brother runs Skyrim on XP 32-bit, Geforce 440 GT, 2 GB of RAM, AMD 3.01 GHz Dual-Core, and has also not experienced any crashes (Most settings on high). I would never recommend getting 32-bit to anyone as 64-bit OS's have come a long way in the past few years, much more stable than XP in my experience.

I've been using Pale Moon, which are basically unofficial official Firefox x64 builds: http://www.palemoon.org/palemoon-x64.shtml

xTx

ewwww.....interesting cuz I am never leaving firefox for Chrome etc.