I have a 1GB card and play at 1680x1050. With the Ultra preset with shadow quality on "high" and Anti-Aliasing dropped to 4X I'm running at 950-1000 MB of VRAM using the HD textures. I have no other mods. If I keep the AA at 8X the VRAM is always a hair over 1GB and occasionally stutters. I can't imagine trying to run them with less VRAM at 1920x1200.

I have a GTX 580 with 1.5GB VRAM and I don't experience any crashes. I'm running Ultra with uGridsToLoad=7 and the hi-res texture pack. If you're having crashes, update your SKSE, SKSE plugins and take a serious look at your mods.

have 260gtx with 896 MB RAM
no fps hit with high-res textures
i`m playing on ultra settings except shadows, which are on medium and AA is set to 4.
resolution 1280x1024
In cities my fps - 40-60, in wildness 55-60 with some drops to 45 when loading new cells

When using low screen resolutions VRAM doesn't matter that much. I think you'll be just fine...

TimoBrick: Skyrim doesn't handle SLI very well or that's what I've heard. For Skyrim one good card is the best option IMO but SLI might be good for other games. I'm running Skyrim with ultra settings + some .ini tweaks + the official high res texture pack and have minimum of 85 fps all times on this system:

MSI 560ti 448core, intel i5- 2500k, asus p8-z68-v LE, 8GB ram, 64bit win7

I was thinking along that lines that a newer card would be better than 2 old cards in SLI. This is the most likely path I will take. By doing so, and getting a new card for each machine, both systems will remain identical and any hiccups can be squashed easy.

Thank you for the response.

NVM