I have skyrim on the ps3 but I am currently in the mode of buying a pc and was wondering what the best pc was for playing skyrim on and using the creation kit. Oh and the cheapest.

Best != cheapest.

My recommendation:
Intel i5-3570K cpu. $220
z77 motherboard $100
8GB of RAM. $50
gtx560ti videocard, or amd6000 series videocard. $200

This is the basis of an excellent gaming system. under $600.
Then you need a case, psu, harddisk and dvd-player. That's another $150-200.
So a new gaming PC would cost your ~$800.
If you have an existing old PC, you might re-use the case, the PSU and the dvd-player. Maybe even the HDD.
Same with a monitor. If you have one, you can reuse it. Or else buy a new 1920x1080 LCD monitor for $150-200.

Such a PC would last you 1-3 years. Then you buy a new videocard, keep all the other components, and it will last you another 2-3 years.

You can get cheaper parts. But I would advice you to not get a cheaper cpu or videocard. The components I listed are the most bang for your buck. They will allow you to play all modern games at fairly high settings. If you wanna spend more money, buy a gtx680 in stead of a gtx560tx ($300 more). Then you'll have the fastest gaming system money can buy. (Ignoring doing crazy things. Or doing SLI/CFI (putting multiple videocards in one PC).

Do a search on these forums. There are many threads about this subject. Almost daily.

Thanks. I do have an old pc that I'm considering modifying. I'll check out the forums a bit more as well, I don't want to rush into anything before I've done my research.

The PC doesn't need to be expensive, but I wouldn't get the cheapest thing you can find.

Two questions:

1-Where are you [country] and what is your budget?

2-Do you have a computer and what is the specs?

Make sure you're OS is 64-bit, this is vital, otherwise only 2 gigs will be recognized by the game. You'll also begin seeing more and more games that won't be compatible with 32-bit.

I wonder if it's better to spend the extra $100 on an i7 2600k instead of a nicer video card?

EDIT: Why can't we delete posts? I wanted to combine this with my previous one.

I'm in England, but after speaking to my cousin and telling him the specs of my dads old pc he just laughed, its 10years old and a peice of crap. He just told me to buy a new one. So i think thats what I'll do.

One more thing, these are the recommended specs followed by the minimum specs (copied from the stickied thread in this forum)

Recommended Specs (For running Skyrim on "High" settings at 1920x1080 resolution)

• Windows 7/Vista/XP PC (32 or 64 bit)
  
• Processor: Quad-core Intel or AMD CPU
  
• 4GB System RAM
  
• 6GB free HDD space
  
• DirectX 9 compatible NVIDIA or AMD ATI video card with 1GB of RAM (Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 or higher; ATI Radeon 4890 or higher).
  
• DirectX compatible sound card
  
• Internet access for Steam activation

Minimum Specs (For running Skyrim on "Low" settings at 1920x1080 resolution)

• Windows 7/Vista/XP PC (32 or 64 bit)
  
• Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor
  
• 2GB System RAM
  
• 6GB free HDD Space
  
• Direct X 9 compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM
  
• DirectX compatible sound card
  
• Internet access for Steam activation

Again, I strongly recommend you get the 64 bit or it won't matter how much RAM you have beyond 2GB. I also recommend you get better than the minimum specs if you can afford to. Default machines come with at least 4GB nowadays so it shouldn't be hard.

Thanks. This is really helpful.

Definitely not !

Most current games still use only 2 cores. Skyrim only uses 2 cores.
There are more and more games coming that use 3-4 cores. So unlike 1-2 years ago, it is now wise to get a 4-core CPU.
There are no games (afaik) that use 5 or more cores. None what so ever.

A i7-2600 has 3 advantages over a i5-2500.
It is 100 MHz faster. Note, at 3.5GHz, that is only 3% faster. You won't notice it in games. Check benchmarks, they all confirm that.
i-7 has hyperthreading. That means you can run 8 threads on the 4 cores.
i-7 has 8MB of cache, in stead of 6MB cache.
Two issues here:
1) No games do more than 4 cores. Complete waste of investment for gamers.
2) Even if games would use more than 4 cores, the hyper-threading would only increase performance by 20-30%, not 100%. Cores are shared between 2 threads.
So basically you'd be paying 100+ dollars/euros for just 2 extra MB of cache.
Not a good investment.

If you want better performance in games, your videocard is most important.
I only recommend it i5-2500k (and soon i5-3570k) because they are have such awesome performance for 200 euros/dollars.

Example, I recently bought a gtx680.
But my CPU is a E8500 (that's a 3.1GHz cpu, but over 4 years old now).
The E8500 is the bottleneck now.
But I kept enabling more and more eyecandy in Skyrim. 8xMSAA. Transparency AA (4xSSA). I started using SSAO (Ambient Occlusion, I love it). The high-res texture pack. Etc. My fps is not so high. But it is almost the same as my fps without all those features. I check gpu usage (with nvidia inspector). When playing, both my CPU and GPU are running at close to 100% utilization. That means that with all the eyecandy enabled, the GPU is so busy, that the CPU isn't holding it back ! Just to show you that GPU power is so much more important than CPU power in games. Even in Skyrim, where everybody (used to) yell that it was CPU-limited.

(Of course, I am buying a new Ivy Bridge i5-3570K myself next week. The E8500 was an excellent choice for a gamer like me 4 years ago. But even then, its time has come).

So if you have more money to spend, spend it on a videocard.
I recommend the gtx560ti (or a AMD 6000 series) because they are around 200 dollar/euro. And do very well in games. Spending more money on videocards will give you less extra performance for your buck. But if you have the money, that is where you should spend it.

But when you buy a processor (the single most important part of the machine), you don't buy for what people are doing right now, you buy for future use. I won't have to replace any part of my pc any time soon. Your processor is the best bang for the buck right now. But games will begin to take advantage of more cores as time goes on. Why not drop an extra $100 now to avoid $300 three years from now?

It is very hard to predict the future. Therefor it is very hard to buy a machine that is designed for the future. It's better to focus on today, and have "future-proof" only in the back of your mind.

For the last few years, framerates in games, and the amount of features you can enable, have been mostly depending on videocards. CPUs have a much lower impact on framerates these days. If you look at all the new eyecandy (SSAO, tesselation, DX11, more elaborate AA methods, etc) then you see that all those features are being done by the GPU. Therefor I believe that the videocard will still be the most important component for gamers in the new few years. And CPUs will be less important, and therefor they matter less, and you should be spending (relatively) less money on them.

I used to be a programmer. I've even written multi-threaded real-time software. (Not gaming software. The software I used to work on runs inside routers). Designing your software to be multi-threaded is not easy. Designing it so that it uses 8 or more threads, that all use a similar amount of compute time, that's even harder. I don't believe that a) games will start using more CPU power in the near future, and that games will be designed properly that you need more than 4 cores. Therefor I think a 4core CPU is a good investment for the next few years.

Of course you are free to disagree with me.

An i7 is really not a good buy if all you plan on doing is gaming. An i5 would work just fine. However if you plan on doing video rendering or anything more processor intensive, then you may want to pick up the i7. Generally the GPU is more important for most games, but skyrim is a bit more CPU intensive that most games. I still say go for an i5.

I am actually waiting for windows to load right now in my 1st gaming PC since 2002 (I switched to xbox then). Now I’m back. I used advice from “how to build a gaming PC dot com and these forums. The meat of my setup is in my sig. Cost me about 1g. I am scared [censored]less I did something wrong while building it and hoping I can finish installing drivers and what not and actually get to play Skyrim in the next day or two...

I agree with everything you say. You should point out, however, that there are still several game engines out there that are heavily CPU dependant. The Creation engine for Skyrim is one. RAGE (GTA series) is another. Creation engine in particular will benefit hugely from a powerful CPU. Having said that, a 3570K or a 2500K should be plenty enough, especially with a moderate overclock.

Skyrim was particularly CPU-heavy when it was released. That was because the release-team of Bethesda had compiled it with the wrong flags. Mods like SkyBoost showed the problem. It was a blunder by Bethesda. After patch 1.3 (or 1.2, I forgot) in January, the game is a lot less depending on the CPU. But it still has the reputation from November.

I'll give you an example.
My machine has a E8500 cpu. That's a 2-core, no hyper-threading cpu that runs at 3.1Hz. It is 4 years and 3 months old now. Last year I decided to not upgrade my machine, and wait for September when new CPUs and GPUs were expected (AMD's Bulldozer cpu, AMD and nVidia videocards). Bulldozer turned out to be not good. And the videocards were delayed. So I waited and waited. When Skyrim was released, I played on my gtx260+E8500.

3-4 Weeks ago, the new nVidia gtx680 was released. I bought one. It is powered by my E8500. Lots of people yell "that CPU is way too slow for such a fast videocard !". Well, indeed, the framerates didn't go up by that much. But I could enable more eyecandy, and my framerates would hardly drop. So I now run with 8xMSAA, 4xSSAA Transparency, Very High SSAO (Ambient Occulusion, I love that), high-res texture pack, more eye-candy mods. And the framerates are still almost the same as if I would run at low settings. I checked (with nvidia inspector): when I play Skyrim, my videocard is almost 100% busy. So is my CPU. That means that my old E8500 is fast enough to keep my gtx680 busy ! As long as I enable enough features on the gtx680 to make it sweat. For me, this is proof that Skyrim is a lot less CPU dependent than people believe.

Of course I will buy a i5-3570K next week ! My E8500 was an awesome CPU. But after 4 years and 3 months, it deserves to be retired. However, with a CPU that is a lot faster, I still don't expect my framerates in Skyrim to go up by more than 20%.

Well, I think it's still pretty CPU dependant, but I suppose it depends a little how you interpret it as well. I recently went from an i7-860, which is stock at 2.8GHz, to an i7-2700K which I overclock at 4.4GHz. My GPU is a Radeon 5970. My fps in Markath on a certain heavy spot (looking up at the watefalls/watermill) went from 25 to 45-50. That's an increase of 80-100%! So it should be interesting to see how much gain you will get with your new CPU. I think it will be higher than 20%.

But what you say is true of course. The more load you put on the graphics in Skyrim the less CPU dependant it is. These benchmarks support that: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-review/15

It's interesting to read about your 680. I'm considering getting that card myself. I hear there will be a version with 4GB VRAM (is that true?). Do you think I should get that, or is it overkill? Is 2GB VRAM enough in your opinion?

That is interesting news to hear about your cpu-upgrade giving you so much more fps. I will certainly test and write down my fps numbers in Skyrim before I upgrade my cpu. And post the results here. Give me 2 weeks.

I love my gtx680. It is very quiet. Certainly at idle.
Last year (in March 2011) I bought a gtx580. But it was so loud at idle, I heard it all day when surfing/reading the web. I sent it back after 2 days. Both that card as my current gtx680 are from Asus. The new gtx680 is inaudible at idle. At load, my machine makes more noise. But I'm not sure if it's the CPU or GPU fan. It's still acceptable. The noises in-game are enough to make me forget about the noise from the PC fans.

For me 2 GB is enough. Skyrim is the most demanding game I play at the moment. (I've played quite a few MMOs. And they have less eyecandy usually. And the eyecandy is never moddable). My vram usage is 1.5-1.6GB last time I checked (with nvidia inspector). I run at 1920x1200, 8xMSAA, very high SSAO, official high-res texture pack, water and flora mods, improved meshes, and a few smaller mods. So I have some headroom to use more mods if I wanted.

I wanted a new videocard asap. I should have bought one a year ago. Therefor I bought the gtx680 the day it was released. Even if I had known a 4GB version would come, I would not have waited for it. So I don't know if it will be worth it to wait now. I did read in many places it is coming. More nivdia cards are expected in May, so I expect a 4GB gtx680 then too. For me, it would be all about the price. 2GB of DDR3 ram costs ~10 euro/dollars. What would be the price of DDR5 ram ? Double of that ? So for me, the price of a 4GB version could be 30 euros more than the 2GB version. If it is more expensive, I'd go with the 2GB version. Your choice.

I had this strategy of not buying the top-end components. But rather components that are 10-20% lower performance, but at 30-50% cheaper prices. And use the money I'd save to upgrade more often. However, that strategy completely failed. My CPU is more than 4 years old, and my gtx260 lasted 3.5 years. So don't ask me about such questions, Obviously I don't know what I'm doing.

Thanks all. This has all been really helpful, I decided to buy a new pc from alienware and with all the information I've recieved I think I've settled on the best pc for me.

Few days ago asked users to do testing of their pc, so can say for sure, that best CPU for Skyrim will be i5-2500k or i7-2600k, not any other models. Why? Because they are faster than any others for gaming purposes when not overclocked and when overclocked (and these are for overclock, very simple). Only newest Ivy Bridge microarchitecture based intel i5, i7 are 8% better by performance, but they are very hot and bad for overclocking (oveclocked Sandy Bridge have greater frequency than Ivy Bridge). You can find results on my forum, about 100 tests.
Videocard: Don't buy two for SLI or Crossfire, this is only add problems and not for playing at single display. Similar (but better) with one videocard which have two gpu on board. Strongly recommend NVidia cards, not so much different problems with drivers (but latest AMD are much cooler) and also PhysX is accelerated (for other games, which use it). Price vs performance depends from your needs, imho gf560ti is enough to not overpay (gf680 of course to buy only if you don't plan to upgrade next 3 years, electricity bills and noise can be ignored).

This is very true, as is the rest of what you said. That being said, as games become increasingly more advanced we will see more development going into using all the threads and developers will create new tools to simplify the process so that future developers will have an even easier time with it. Eventually, it will become the norm while some other newer technology will exist that people will be asking if they should spend the extra $100 for just in case and others will be saying that they'll never need that.

Remember when 256 MB RAM was "more than you'll ever need"? Knowing and paying attention to history is the best way to predict the future. These new technologies do represent a better technology and so will play a role in our next generation of gameplaying baring some unforeseen significant advancement in the way we use computers.

I hope so. But I fear that might not be true.
Most developers now develop their games "cross platform". For PC and consoles. Most engines are "scalable". Which means that on better hardware you can enable more eyecandy. But there is a limit. They always keep the bottomline hardware in consideration. That means they will always make sure their games will run on the least powerful hardware. And that will be old consoles. This requirement makes it harder for them to work on the other side of the scale, where the newest and fastest hardware is. As an example, as long as a game is developed cross-platform, it will have DirectX9 support. But it might not have DirectX11 support. This has kept back new technology in games during the last few years. And that trend might continue. Very sad.

This is not true for multi-threading. Writing parallel software requires a lot of effort. You have to design your software for parallelism from the start. And there is no easy cookbook on how to do that. The average programmers will get better doing it. But it might take a while (10+ years). And even then it will not be an easy problem. Some problems are easily parallized. Some others are not. My favorite example is: you can make 9 women pregnant, but that doesn't mean you'll have a baby in 1 month ....

I remember 640KB was more than you'll ever need.
I remember having 1MB of RAM in my SparcStation at work. And that was a blindingly fast machine.

I agree with you that new technology is rolling forward all the time. But multi-threading is a special case. It might take a while, even in high-tech games.

Yes, I've discussed the "old consoles" problem at length. The next generation needs to have more upgradeable components like the HDD of this generation. Consoles need to become more like pcs, honestly. Optimizations would be tricky but upgradeability can get the console companies a much longer life out of consoles and they can finally start making money on their machines if upgrading is a luxury. I'm hoping to see machines broken into at least three (maybe four components) that can be interchangeable. 1. The motherboard with the processor/videocard and the basic other stuff. 2. RAM 3. HDD (the 4th option would be the videocard if they could figure out optimizing an interchangeable part with the processor).

You're saying that people won't come up with new development tools to expediate the process? I find that difficult to believe. Can you expound on this?

Reading old pc magazines is hilarious.

Agreed. But I still think that if you're the type of person who wants to play the most cutting edge games that this is a worthy investment, even if you end up only getting a handful of games that utilize it in the short term.

Yes, people are building tools to try and make parallel programming easier. They have been doing this since the eighties. Maybe even earlier. It turns out that even with these tools, it's not that easy. Programmers have to be always aware what can happen (and what can go wrong) when writing multi-threaded software. Basically it is very dangerous to have 2 threads access the same data at the same time. Therefor you need to create locks around those pieces of data that can be accessed by different threads at the same time. But those locks can slow down performance. But even worse, they cause a whole new class of problems (deadlock, starvation, etc). There are tools that try to help programmers by anolyzing their code. But I guess those tools aren't flawless. I believe Haswell (the next generation of Intel processors) will have hardware support for locking parts of memory. That should help performance quite a bit. But still, all these nasty problems of writing parallel code are still there.

I've written some real-time software in the past. Multi-threaded, multi-process. Getting the interaction between threads and processes right was very tricky. And we used tricks to make it easier for us (non-premptive scheduling). Some new forms of programming require programmers to get more experience with the new stuff. Like how it took a while for people to start using Object Oriented Programming. But writing parallel code is different, imho. It requires more intelligence than experience.

Anyway, this is my own opinion. But so far I haven't seen much software that disproves it. For some commercial software, where the pay-off is big, and the solution is fairly straightforward (videoediting software, some math software) we now have multi-threaded software. For most other software, it is still single-threaded.

Interesting. I'm not saying you're wrong, but that time will tell.

I'd say that there wasn't a ton of reason behind pouring resources into these tools in the 80's when the hardware market couldn't use it. Now that it's a viable alternative we should expect to see it becoming worth the investment to develop for. That's when you see breakthroughs, when it's worth it. What good would multithreading have done 80's computers that weren't made for it? It'd be weird to have the software before the hardware, honestly.

I'd also like to revisit your 4 core vs. 8 core argument that no games use 5 or more corse. I'd like to point out that until a few years ago, no game used more than 2 cores and before that, no game used more than 1. Technology is progressing and 8 cores aren't that far from being standard as intel keeps advancing the chains of progress. Can't games be made to utilize 4 or 8 cores or is it tied to one or the other?