Would you upgrade your pc to play skyrim?

[Brian 321]

Ok so I am just now getting into pc gaming and skyrim is awesome so far. I recently installed some graphic mods and they looked amazing but made my fps drop. Right now with very few mods I can run on the high setting and get the occasional stutter while turning or drawing my weapon.

This is my current set up:
i5 3330 CPU
Gigabyte H77M-d3h
Gtx 650 SC graphics card
8gb ddr3 ram
450w power supply

That was my first pc build and never planned on overclocking but now I want to upgrade to:

i5 3570k(will overclock)
Gigabyte ga-z77X-ud3h
SLI another gtx 650
8gb ram(keeping the same for now)
750w PSU

Do you guys think it's worth it considering I most likely won't be playing skyrim forever, I really want to put a lot of graphic mods on this game before I finish the game.nBut I could also just hold out until better hardware comes out.

What do you guys recommend?

 

[Maximilian]

I wouldn't bother.

Skyrim although much fun is far from a technological marvel worth upgrading for. Crummy directX 9 engine with last gen graphics and limited multithreading support, nah.

 

[Stringjam]

I would buy a better single GPU instead of getting another GTX650 to SLI.

The bad thing is, you could spend a lot of money and still get that occasional stuttering in Skyrim....and a lot of games, for that matter.

I have an OC'd i7 930 and a GTX 670 4GB and I still get random stuttering in Skyrim.

Sometimes you can throw a lot of horsepower at a game, but it's the engine causing the issues, so no, I wouldn't upgrade for one single game, but I would upgrade to play games more smoothly as a whole.

 

[clok1966]

Well you got one side of the coin, here is the other..

I look at how much fun i have with a game and decide, it sounds like you enjoy, if money is not tight and it would do no fiscal harm otherwise, why not? Upgrades will only make other games (and Skyrim) play better. I Enjoyed skyrim enough to have played it through on several types of players, Mage, Archer, pure sword and Board, pure stealth...

its the age old question, why wash my car if it will just get dirty again? Why upgrade when i will just need to upgrade again?

good luck whatever you decide.

 

[Arkaign]

Max's point is valid, though once you mod Skyrim it does really start to look really really nice.

Assuming you have a viable Ebay account or are willing to sell your components here on AT FS/FT (list them for a good price, and boom they will be gone) .. I would do this instead :

Sell 3330
Sell 650
Sell PSU

Get :

Used 2500k (no reason for 3570k unless you live near MC), just saw one of these sell here for $145

Decent brand 550w PSU

7950 3GB

That's the combo. Skyrim + mods = needs video ram. SLI 650s are still limited to the max ram of one of the 650s, and 650s are pretty slow in the big picture, even two of them is still not that hot. I think actually a single 660ti may be faster in some respects. There is a BIG gap. 7950 with current drivers does really nicely with Skyrim, both vanilla and modded.

And you should definitely visit the PC Gaming forum and look at member pics of modded Skyrim, awesome stuff.

 

[darkewaffle]

No. I wouldn't play Skyrim at all personally

 

[Qbah]

I would (and did). Love that game to death I got a 4GB GTX670 just because Skyrim was destroying my 1GB HD5850 (and my GTX670 2GB which I exchanged for a 4GB model too!). My modded Skyrim eats over 2GB VRAM. No idea how much your GTX650 has, but 2GB is the absolute minimum to have a good experience - at 1080p I needed more though.

Also, your i5 3330 is a quad core Ivy Bridge with a 3GHz clock (turbo to 3.2), so it's enough to enjoy the game without slowdowns. No need to upgrade anything other than the GPU and PSU (might not be enough).

I spent over 500 hours with Skyrim - and each one was filled with loads of fun. The game, heavily modded with high resolution textures, new models, new effects and other cool things can look really gorgeous

 

[dmoney1980]

OP - I would wait until Haswell comes out (June 6th?) before purchasing anything. A lot of people will be selling off their 3570k and 2500k CPU's along with their GPU's in order to upgrade to the latest and greatest.

Regarding the GPU - don't get another 650 for SLI! You'll still be vRAM limited since SLI only uses one cards GPU. You are better off selling your GPU and adding some cash for a new one. I would recommend 3gb vRAM at minimum if you plan on modding the game heavily. I have a 3gb 7950 and I play skyrim at 1440p, and it plays fine with some occasional slowdowns.

 

[shortylickens]

To get the game running?
Yes.


To get plugins running?
NO!

 

[lilrayray69]

How can you not run it on Ultra without AA? Isn't your 650 SC a 2GB version? That may not be quite as fast as my OC'd 7850, but probably close.
Your i5 is Ivy bridge right, should be beating out my fx-6300. And 8gb DDR 3 like me...I run Skyrim on Ultra with 50+ mods just fine.

You are going to get stuttering in Skyrim no matter what at times, the engine is simply not that well made. They do make some mods which increase performance though.

I'd start out making sure your Skyrim is completely up to date, installing all 4 unofficial patches and then seeing if you can't run on Ultra, at least without AA enabled.

Most mods have little to no FPS impact. If you have the VRAM most high res textures have literally 0 FPS drop - as stock Skyrim barely even uses 1GB without AA.

Now if you are trying to use a mod like ENB then yeah that's going to hit you with a ~50% FPS drop and to successfully run ENB in all it's glory you probably would need to upgrade your PC.

We've got a thread on modding Skyrim just below here you should check out.

If you were to upgrade I would wait until Haswell as others have mentioned. I've personally never sold old parts on EBay nor here, though I should give that a try.
I too would not get another 650 to SLI. No increase in VRAM.

 

[flexy]

""
i5 3570k(will overclock)
Gigabyte ga-z77X-ud3h
SLI another gtx 650
8gb ram(keeping the same for now)
750w PSU
""

Doesn't make sense to get such a high-end PC w/ 8GB Ram and STILL having two 650. I would first try to get a newer, up-to-date graphics card (somewhere around GTX 670) with enough VRAM.

I am in the same boat with GTA IV and mods, some mods REALLY make my PC crawl but mainly because GTA IV is a horrible port...according to this I would need a better CPU (my CPU is ancient!)..but then I have no problems WHATSOEVER in any other game, even the latest and "greatest". Then I would not base my h/w purchases based on ONE single, badly coded game.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I probably wouldn't in your position.

That said, I went with a 2GB video card my last upgrade round because I wanted it to last a while and I knew Skyrim worked better with 2GB or VRAM.

 

[Headfoot]

I upgraded my PC from a Phenom II to a 2500k @ 4.4 just for Skyrim. CPU is what you need for that game (unless you run the high-res mods, then you need VRAM) since the engine only runs 2 threads. Just overclock what you've got as much as you can and call it a day

 

[Brian 321]

Thank you guys for all the replys. I think I will just wait until the Haswell now. When I monitor my system I average 60-70% of core use with the maximum I use it 100%(I assume this is when I get the fps drop). And I am using 99% of my gpu at its maximum(I forgot to check the average).

Do you guys think I would benifot from upgrading my graphics card and adding another 8gb of ram? My graphics card only has 1gb of VRAM because I had no idea what that was when I bought it. Could my graphics card cause fps drop?

Thanks again.

 

[Zeze]

Am I the only one who thinks vanilla Skyrim still looks very nice? It's not just about getting texture and lighting mods.

Skyrim does a wonderful job creating atmosphere through ambiance, sound, terrain, beautiful world, etc...

 

[Stringjam]

Am I the only one who thinks vanilla Skyrim still looks very nice?

I'm a PC gamer. Nice is never good enough.


Honestly, though, I just really enjoy mods. I'm glad when devs give us that option, and it adds a lot of value to the game, IMO.

 

[Dumac]

Thank you guys for all the replys. I think I will just wait until the Haswell now. When I monitor my system I average 60-70% of core use with the maximum I use it 100%(I assume this is when I get the fps drop). And I am using 99% of my gpu at its maximum(I forgot to check the average).

Do you guys think I would benifot from upgrading my graphics card and adding another 8gb of ram? My graphics card only has 1gb of VRAM because I had no idea what that was when I bought it. Could my graphics card cause fps drop?

Thanks again.

Getting another graphics card would definitely be more beneficial. 8GB of ram is plenty.

I would upgrade to a 780 or 770, but honestly your rig is probably "good enough" right now if you care about getting decent mileage on your hardware.

As for CPU, I'd get an i7 3770k. i5's are generally good enough, but some games are just starting to show performance benefits from an i7.

 

[lilrayray69]

lol well yeah if he can afford pretty much top of the line stuff - go for an i7 and a 780. However if you don't want and/or can't afford to spend $1000 on a CPU+GPU you should give us a budget to work with.

And yeah another 8gb of RAM would not be worth it.

The GPU is what you need to upgrade the most at the moment, and probably a new PSU to power it.

 

[BD231]

No. I would upgrade my PC because it can't play skyrim.

 

[Brian 321]

My budget is about $500 right now. I'm just concerned if I buy something like a 670 4gb and psu that I will still be limited by my CPU/motherboard since they are locked and I can't overclock.

 

[TidusZ]

I've upgraded my cpu for specific games many times but I wouldn't do it for skyrim.
btw
counterstrike = dedicated videocard
total annihilation = 48 mb ram
diablo 2 = 128 mb ram
supreme commander = dual core processor/mobo

These were all games that I played all day everyday for at least 1 year.. Skyrim for me was okay for a few days.

 

[Brian 321]

I've upgraded my cpu for specific games many times but I wouldn't do it for skyrim.
btw
counterstrike = dedicated videocard
total annihilation = 48 mb ram
diablo 2 = 128 mb ram
supreme commander = dual core processor/mobo

These were all games that I played all day everyday for at least 1 year.. Skyrim for me was okay for a few days.

I'm sure I will get tired of Skyrim eventually, But I am still getting use to the keyboard and mouse for gaming and it seems like Skyrim is a slower pace. I am also thinking about other games because if I upgrade it will still help me for other games later on other than just Skyrim.

 

[Cerb]

A Radeon 7870 or 7950 2+GB, or a GTX 660 or 660 Ti with 2+GB (I think that's standard on all of the, but just in case...) would take care of all of that that isn't from their customized Gamebryo (and what is due tot hat, nothing will fix). A GTX 650, even if 2GB, is going to choke on graphics mods, and hold back your CPU in other games, most likely.

By the time you could make use of any 4+GB card today, without using high res monitor(s) and SLI, newer GPUs will have far superceded it.

 

[Headfoot]

From personal experience I can tell you with fairly good certainty that sporadic stutters when facing many enemies or entering towns is 100% CPU limitation. I used to get something like 20 fps at most in the large towns in skyrim on my Phenom II 940 @ 3.8 w/ DDR2-800. Literally over doubled that number when I moved to a 2500k @ 4.4 with DDR3-1600. This was before the CPU patch where they doubled those numbers again by correctly implementing newer instruction sets (apparently release day Skyrim didn't use any variety of SSE instruction whatsoever...). The gap stayed the same.

This all depends on what resolution you are running. I was running 1680x1050 so the graphics load was lower

 

[Clump]

I played a toon through Skyrim when it first came out, then really didn't play it at all until pretty recently. Running an i7 2600K mildly overclocked with 16GB RAM. A couple of months ago I upgraded the graphics to an HD7950 Radeon, factory overclocked.

I reloaded Skyrim from Steam, got it up to date and added the official hi-res textures. I don't have any other plugins. Playing at 1920x1200 on ultra with AA and AF maxed (16x AA? Don't remember off hand). With V-sync on it stays locked at 59.9 FPS. In towns, dungeons, battles, whatever it doesn't change and play is very smooth. I haven't bothered turning V-sync off to see what frame rate I would get because it's so sweet at this point.

7950 is plenty capable. It really looks great with this setup too.