Hello everyone,

I have recently sold my Xbox and purchased a new gaming PC, and now wish to rekindle my love of Skyrim.

However this has not been straightforward and I am hitting barriers every step of the way.

My computer:

GTX 560M
i7-2670 @ 2.20Ghz
16GB DDR3 1333MHz

Initially I was getting 30-40FPS on the recommended vanilla High (1080), and so I spiced things up with a couple of mods from Steamworks. This unfortunately crippled the game and I was stuck on ~10FPS. Removing the mods made no difference, and so I had to totally uninstall the game. I also updated the graphics driver to the latest at this point. When I reinstalled I was delighted to find the recommended graphics were Ultra (1080), and I had an awesome night of Skyrim getting 40-60FPS. The next day I made a backup of my save and tried Steamworks mods again. Once again it crippled the FPS to ~10, and even after uninstalling (everything) and reinstalling just Skyrim I am still getting ~10FPS in both new games and my existing save.

I have tried a number of tweaks and the like but NOTHING is working and I am becoming quite frustrated (read: sad).

If anyone has any suggestions or have had a similar experience and can help me solve my troubles, I'll gladly buy them a beer

My pc isn't a super build, so I default to high as opposed to ultra. I get a few hiccups here and there so I set it to medium (with anti-aliasing turned off right now due to new catalyst drivers) and my game works beautifully.

AMD FX-4100 3.6 Ghz quad core
8GB DDR3 1333
AMD Radeon 6790 1GB

Personally I'm an AMD fan because of a bad experience with Nvidia chipsets, a few years ago I bought an AGP Nvidia card for my old pc that idled around 65C and died after 6 months even after installing an aftermarket fan and heatsinks. I switched to a Sapphire card with an AMD chipset, it idled at half the temp my Nvidia card did without aftermarket parts and was able to run an MMO I play called Eve Online at near max settings on my very old system. (This was on a 2.8Ghz p4 with 4GB DDR1 and a 512MB AGP video card, so it made me a believer)

The only thing I could suggest is turning down your graphics a bit, it might svck if you're more interested in graphics instead of gameplay, but until you get the nfail out of your case you aren't left with many options in my personal opinion.

And Nvidia fans, this is my personal opinion based on experience, so Nvidia [censored] need not flame.

edit: fan boys is censored? I though I cursed when I read after posting. lol

The computer confirmed it is capable of running vanilla Ultra @1080 when it ran for over six hours getting between 40-60FPS. I need a solution that addresses the extreme drop down to ~10FPS, not simple graphical tweaks for incremental gains.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Also the ~10FPS occurs in Medium, High and Ultra... which makes me think something has gone wrong deep under the surface...

Which particular mods did you try? Are you sure they're not active any more (untick via Data Files)?

I'd run GPU-Z in the background to see how your graphics card is coping, especially VRAM. Tick the box so it keeps gathering stats while Skyrim is running, play the game for a while and then use the drop-downs on each of the results to see the "max". Let us know. Also look at your shadows and AA settings, they're the main culprits.

Worth verifying the integrity of your Steam files, and regenerating your .ini files. Take it your Skyrim version is up to date?