I stumbled upon a very specific INI tweak guide (I believe it was on these forums) awhile back that made my Skyrim perform like it should with my PC build (default settings it currently underperforms quite a bit).

I remember that the INI tweaks modified something that had to do with multicore processing.

Would anyone perhaps know what I'm talking about? I can't seem to find it anymore.

A lot of ini tweaks seem to be considered unstable, but http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2227329&page=8 seems to be dealing with more of what your looking at. That whole thread should have some good stuff in it for you, although a lot of patches have been released since those earlier entries, so who knows what's changed (well, probably everyone but me, actually ).

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/814/ has check boxes that will add the multicore rendering ini tweak for specific graphical features.

I've tried a lot of these tweaks. There was this one very specific setting profile that really did the trick for me, and all I can remember about it is that it edited a line about multicore processing :/. Cleaned up every FPS problem and fixed mouse lag.

Mmm interesting thread thanks for the heads up
http://www.gamesas.com/user/583028-natethegreatt/ care to point out the best tweaks since th thread is quite long....

i Use this site for modding my ini's http://donotargue.com/cfg-makers/skyrim/
it has memory & core Tweeks

Problem with DNA site is that it looks like they just took every value they could think of. No real testing done by the authors to see if they really make a difference. So it annoys me when you have the Extreme option, because some of the "Extreme" options dont do anything.

The thing about the Skyrim Configurator, that I would be concerned about, at least in principle, is that it always includes all the possible settings it knows of in your ini file. Or at least it did so when I had a look at it.

That would not be an issue, if one actually knew what the internal defaults for the settings are (assuming they are meaningful to begin with), and if those would also be the defaults for the Configurator. But that does not appear to be the case. Without the Configurator, you can at least assume, that some internal default settings, that you normally don't see in the ini, are likely to be reasonably set by the developers. With the Configurator, however, If you don't specifically check some option as "on", it will create an ini file with that option "off", and to be sure that you are not actually degrading your performance, you have to go through all the apparently extra and optional settings and turn them "on", as it does not contain an "I don't know about this, so let's trust the developers and not include it"-option. It kind of makes mockery of the concept of an optional setting, and forces you to make uninformed choices even about those settings that don't normally appear in untweaked ini files.

So, If I were to use the Configurator, I would use its output merely as a list of settings that may or may not have an effect, and I would manually copy those settings I might like to experiment with into my true ini files.