Hey guys,

Well I haven't played Skyrim yet. I know most have on this forum, and was hoping for some pointers you learned by trail and error, stuff you could pass on, before I install.

I have a new laptop here tomorrow (Sat). What tweaks need to be done, for a better chance at a enjoyable game.

Such as drivers, or any tweaks a Nvidia card needs before playing, maybe must have mods, or threads I might have missed.

Thanks!

System:
Mobile Chassis: MYTHLOGIC Pollux 1611 Chassis (Clevo P150HM)
Exterior Finish: Standard Finish
Mobile Display: 15.6" Full HD (1920x1080) Matte 95% NTSC Color Gamut LED Backlit LCD
Dead Pixel Guarantee: MYTH Pixel Perfect Guarantee
Monitor Calibration: Free MYTH Professional Monitor Color Calibration
CPU: Intel Core i7-2760QM 2.40GHz, 1600MHz DDR3, 6MB Cache, Socket G2 Mobile Processor
Thermal Compound: Free IC Diamond Thermal Compound
System Memory: 8GB (2 x 4GB) , PC3-12800, 1600MHz SODIMM (Patriot)
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GTX 580M 2048MB GDDR5 DX11 Compliant Video Card
Optical: Swap Out Optical drive for additional Hard Drive
Hard Drive: Crucial 128GB M4 Series SATA III 6.0GB/sec Solid State Drive
Hard Drive: 250GB 7200 16MB Cache SATA Notebook Hard Drive
Fingerprint Reader: Integrated Fingerprint Reader
Network Card: Onboard Gigabit (10/100/1000 Mbits/sec) LAN subsystem
Wireless Card: KILLER WirelessN-1102
Bluetooth: ASUS Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR USB Adapter
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium

Honestly, just check to see that all your hardware drivers are up to date and that you have the latest version of Direct X installed. Often, computers are shipped with a butt-load of extra software that can be manually removed (Should be removed.) Remove all of the unwanted junk, then run disk defrag on your computer overnight. You could look into over-clocking your CPU, but I advise extreme caution. I would suggest taking it to a professional for help on that. Other things to do are to set your default start-up programs to bare bones minimum, and set your display settings for optimal performance. Start out with the lowest visual settings first, and increase what is important to you visually little by little.

Hope that helps

1-Antivius, Windows updates, latest Nvidia driver, CCleaner, Auslogics Defrag [do not defrag SSD], HWMonitor, Fraps
2-See what others are using to overclock the GPU and by what at a http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/.
3-http://www.geforce.com/Optimize/Guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide.

I would suggest reviewing http://www.geforce.com/Optimize/Guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide?sf2686171=1.

The only graphics-related .ini file tweak I used was adjusting the grass draw distance (fGrassStartFadeDistance=14000.0000). This doubles the grass draw distance but did not really impact frame rate in my case. I tried using a tweak that increases the tree draw distance, but the result seemed to be that distant mountain landscapes were populated with many strange-looking tree shapes that lacked detail and IMHO it looked much better with the vanilla tree draw distance (maxed setting in graphics options menu)

With a 580m you may want to consider trying some of the more extreme graphics tweaks suggested by Ghazi, such as increasing the number of zones which load. I'm also playing on a laptop, but with AMD 5830m and i7-820QM, so I was very conservative with these tweaks. I was able to run the game very well at 1920x1080 with most settings maxed except using FXAA instead of MSAA. Completely maxing out anisotropic filtering to 16 samples did not reduce my frame rate at all, so you should be able to do the same. I did not install any mods and I was running the game at stock GPU clocks (but high performance laptop power plan setting to un-throttle the CPU).

Also, I found the following non-graphics tweaks to greatly improve my enjoyment of the game:

bShowCompass=0 (removes compass from HUD display. this made exploration a lot of fun as I frequently had to refer to my map and pay attention to actual landscapes and buildings in the distance. It also allowed me to find a lot more locations through quests, as when the compass is enabled, I have a tendency to want to check out every single shiny new black location icon that pops up and turn it white. )

Set Timescale to 8 (this is not an .ini tweak, but a console command you must enter in-game)
This slows down the passing of day and night by 50%, as the default value is 16. I like this pace much more as with the default setting it seemed that I was walking to some location and the passing of day and night was so fast that it was almost distracting. You can slow it down as low as 1 (1:1 timescale) or speed it up tremendously in order to record time lapse video footage.

Thanks for the advice. I also found a good source on Skyrim steam forums.

You know what you should do? Pray. Pray to god your game will even work.

I just finished building a very expensive computer yesterday, and to my surprise, my game STILL CTDs. I guess not even 16GB of RAM, a GTX 580, or an i7 could save Skyrim.
Honestly, running this game without any problems is a huge gamble, it's pathetic.

Sorry to hear it, and I hope I don't have your problem, that would be depressing if I was in your shoes..

Try a clean boot: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/331796 lots of prebuilt pcs come with a lot of crap running in the background and TES games have always been very sensitive to it.


Also get the 4gb patch: http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1013 This shoudl get rid of most of your ctds unless they are caused by another source)

The showcompass and timescale advice posted above are merely personal preference and do no affect performance (personally I do not like any of these two options).

Buy a different game?

580m and i7 2.4 ghz? sorry to say that,buy a real pc or buy another game or make a brutal cooling system for your laptop...and pray...xD and lol, smooth beginning with bugeshda??

For the price tag of 2700 dollars, I'd get a desktop that'll destory any laptop in terms of performance.

BUT sounds like you already bought it so we can't prevent a fail.
Just update the drivers and good luck to you on that...

That laptop already has an outstanding cooling system, a 580m is pretty close to a desktop GTX460 in performance, and mobile Sandy Bridge is certainly adequate (turbo boost up to 3.5GHz on a 2760QM I believe). Learn what you're talking about.