Upgrading CPU for Skyrim w/ 1000+ mods and ENB

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jradigann

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Oct 15, 2017
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I'm running over a thousand mods on Skyrim Legendary Edition and want to max out my performance and eliminate stutter.

I have a GTX 1070 (8GB VRAM) so I doubt upgrading my GPU further will do anything.

My CPU is an Intel i5 4460 (3.2GHz is what my PC says but I see it advertised at 3.4GHz?) and I think it might be bottleknecking my FPS. I get 50 to 60FPS in most outdoor areas but it can drop to 22fps in cities and I often get frame drops when many actors appear. Sometimes when transitioning cells my game will freeze for a second or two while loading.

I have 8GB RAM; worth upgrading to 16GB for this? How else can I optimize my performance?

Specs:

Processor:
Intel Core i5-4460 Quad-Core 3.40 GHz CPU, Socket LGA1150 (Intel 4th Generation Processor)

Motherboard: MBAR001054
ASRock Z97 Anniversary, Socket LGA1150

RAM: ADATA XPG V2 Series Tungsten Grey 8 GB (2x4 GB) DDR3 1600 MHz CL10 Dual Channel RAM

Video Card: GTX 1070 (8GB VRAM, 8GBps GDDR5)

Solid State Drive:
ADATA SX900 256 GB Solid State Drive (SSD)

Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 1 TB (1000 GB) Hard Drive

Power Supply:
EVGA SuperNOVA 750 B2 750 Watt Modular 80PLUS Bronze Certified Power Supply

Case: Bitfenix Neos Black/Black Wind

Thanks in advanced! :)
 
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jaguarskx
The i5-8600k is an 8th gen CPU that has 6 cores. The i7-8600k is an 8th gen CPU with 6 cores, plus it has something called Hyper Threading (HT) which allows each core to process 2 threads of instructions instead of just one. In a Core i5 CPU without HT, when a core is done executing instruction, it basically waits more more instructions to process from that thread. In a Core i7 CPU with HT, when a core is done executing instruction in a thread it can then switch to another thread an process those instructions. That is HT in a small simple nutshell.

The thing about HT though is that programs (or games) need to be designed in order to make use of HT. Skyrim (like the vast majority of games) are not designed to make use HT. Therefore if...
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chemmajorp53

chemmajorp53

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Apr 5, 2013
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Buying another 8GB of RAM wouldn't hurt if you plan on staying with LGA 1150 for a while, but I'm not sure that upgrading your CPU would really help that much. Skyrim isn't exactly a well-threaded game and your current CPU already has decent single core performance. When you're installing that many mods you're more or less running into the limitations of the engine rather than your hardware.

If you were to upgrade, at least make it worth it and get an 8600k or 8700k and OC it. A 4790k would give you a small boost in performance, but it's hard to justify spending $250 or so on that old of a processor.

Also, DX9 can only use 4GB of VRAM, so you might be running into limitations there. Honestly I would look into optimizing your mods before upgrading hardware.
 
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J

jradigann

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Oct 15, 2017
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I'm using a mod pack that other users can run better than me using an i7 6600k and 16GB RAM (yet a worse graphics card), I'll inspect my configuration but I'd be interested in upgrading my CPU anyway.

Could you elaborate on the difference between the 8600k and 8700k? I'm not too knowledgeable when it comes to CPUs and don't get the difference between an i5 series and i7 series. I'd love to stream my gameplay as well; how does CPU choice help out with that?

I appreciate the help!
 
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jaguarskx

jaguarskx

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Apr 19, 2006
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The i5-8600k is an 8th gen CPU that has 6 cores. The i7-8600k is an 8th gen CPU with 6 cores, plus it has something called Hyper Threading (HT) which allows each core to process 2 threads of instructions instead of just one. In a Core i5 CPU without HT, when a core is done executing instruction, it basically waits more more instructions to process from that thread. In a Core i7 CPU with HT, when a core is done executing instruction in a thread it can then switch to another thread an process those instructions. That is HT in a small simple nutshell.

The thing about HT though is that programs (or games) need to be designed in order to make use of HT. Skyrim (like the vast majority of games) are not designed to make use HT. Therefore if both the i5-8600k and i7-8700k were running at the same clockspeed the FPS would be virtually the same. Windows background processes can make use of HT, but the improvement in FPS between an i5-8600k and i7-8700k running at the same speed would probably be something like a 2 FPS difference.

I don't know if Skyrim will get any real benefits with a 6 core CPU, Skyrim does not really make full use of a quad core CPU. According to the link below that reviewed Skyrim back in 2011; Skyrim only managed to max out 1 core (90% - 100%) while the other 3 cores were running between 30% to 50%. The game was tested on an i7-2600k which has HT and it would appear as a 8 core CPU because of HT.


https://www.techspot.com/review/467-skyrim-performance/page7.html


While Skyrim may not be able to use all 6 core core in the i5-8600k, Windows background process can make use of the unused cores and cores that are not full maxed out. But Windows background process are generally not very CPU intensive at all.

However, since you mentioned streaming... Streaming involves video encoding which can be extremely taxing on the CPU; it all depends on the settings you are using. For streaming purpose, you generally do not want to use settings that are very taxing. Modern video codecs are designed to use multiple cores as well as HT. Therefore, if you are streaming your gameplay, then I recommend going with the i7-8700k. Otherwise, the i5-8600k is fine for simply playing games.
 
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xpoverzion

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Nov 10, 2017
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Don't listen to anyone here. For one, Skyrim can handle 1000 mods, 4K textures, etc if you set it up correctly. The comment above about Skyrim only being able to utilize 4GB of VRAM is nonsense. This guy must be living in the past, and under a rock. I have over 900 mods installed on Skyrim LE and at any given time the game can use about 10GB's of VRAM (GTX 1080 TI), and 18GB's of system RAM. I can run it for hours on end without any crashes, freezing, etc.. As for stuttering, this is not a limitation of the game engine unless it's due to script lag. The primary culprit for stuttering is your computer's hard drive or SSD not being able to deliver data to the GPU or RAM at a fast enough rate. When you heavily mod Skyrim, especially with a lot of 4K/2K textures, you'll often see that the GPU may want up to 1GB of data instantaneously to render the changing scenery as you walk around in the game. If you have skyrim installed on a 7200rpm hard drive, you can expect a lot of studdering and freezing as the hard drive can't deliver data to the GPU at a quick enough rate to render the scene fluidly. Even SATA SSD's have a hard time keeping up with the data delivery rate to the GPU due to SATA 3 limitations. You can experience a relatively studderless game if you put Skyrim and those 1000 mods on a NVMe SSD that will give you about 1GB/s of random read data transfer speeds to the GPU utilizing the PCIe lanes. This is as good as it gets at the moment for a very heavily modded Skyrim. Even with this technology, there will still be some studdering in the game, but it's very minimal. Not to mention that the NVME SSD's incredibly fast read rate also speeds up loading screens quite a bit. Get a relatively new processor, overclock it, and upgrade to the latest SSD technology and your heavily modded skyrim is a joy to play. That's assuming you know what you're doing to get 100's of mods to work together without crashing the game. Good luck!!
 
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