Build for playing skyrim on ultra

[archmealfiller]

I'm thinking about building a new gaming pc. Does it look like it could run skyrim on ultra settings? What about with mods? Here are the specs I've got so far:

PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/wK1Q


CPU: Intel Core i5-3470 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor ($179.99 @ NCIX US)
Motherboard: MSI B75MA-E33 Micro ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($60.98 @ PCM)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($46.98 @ Amazon)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($69.99 @ NCIX US)
Video Card: XFX Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Card ($279.99 @ NCIX US)
Case: NZXT Source 220 ATX Mid Tower Case ($49.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Corsair Enthusiast 650W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply ($79.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Asus DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS DVD/CD Writer ($19.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $787.90

Thanks for your help!

 

[simon12]

Without mods easy a 7850 could, but mods vary and some just don't work well but generally yes no problem.

 

[jakewat97]

All of those parts are a great choice and will easily do the job. Only thing is maybe consider a better motherboard for future expansion because it is only small and limits you to only two sticks of ram and probably only one gfx card. Have you got any budget left?

 

[archmealfiller]

All of those parts are a great choice and will easily do the job. Only thing is maybe consider a better motherboard for future expansion because it is only small and limits you to only two sticks of ram and probably only one gfx card. Have you got any budget left?

Yeah I've got a little bit left. I'm thinking now about an ASRock H77M Micro ATX LGA1155 Motherboard instead. Not sure if that allows for more expansion

thanks!

 

[Alex The PC Gamer]

The VCard would be fine on average...it's just when you get to cities that a combination of HD Textures + Graphic enhancers + flaura mods would be stressing any card in general...so you'll be fine, just expect 20-40FPS sometimes when moving around the city.

My biggest recommendation would be to get an SSD drive for gaming and keep your HDD for storage. Load times will be dramatically better not to mention boot times.

My 2 cent.

 

[archmealfiller]

The VCard would be fine on average...it's just when you get to cities that a combination of HD Textures + Graphic enhancers + flaura mods would be stressing any card in general...so you'll be fine, just expect 20-40FPS sometimes when moving around the city.

My biggest recommendation would be to get an SSD drive for gaming and keep your HDD for storage. Load times will be dramatically better not to mention boot times.

My 2 cent.

Thanks for the input. Would a 670 gtx perform better in those circumstances? I'm thinking about paying more for that one if it's considerably better.

 

[Alex The PC Gamer]

Thanks for the input. Would a 670 gtx perform better in those circumstances? I'm thinking about paying more for that one if it's considerably better.

This is hard to tell because all Skyrim benchmarks are based on the vanilla settings (even if very high). As soon as you add HD Textures and graphic enhancers your benchmark references are obsolete.

That said, I could run the game pretty well but would run into slowdowns in cities when I played with my single GTX 560 Ti ...and that with many many graphic mods installed. For me, going SLI was the way to go...now i'm getting 40FPS+ with INI files tweaks and many graphic mods installed. Note that 560 Ti in SLI is about the same performance as a GTX 580 or a GTX 660 Ti.

To be honest, even the GTX 670 will run into slowdowns in cities if you have a considerable amount of graphic mods installed...so beware of those. Choosing the right mods is equally important.

 

[Witcher79]

You may not be worried about price but really man if you want to run skyrim on ultra you don't need a very heavy duty graphics card. Its a great game, but that card is over kill if that all your going to play. if your playing other things though it should be fine. For skyrim though you may want something less heavy duty if your on a budget. Also you may want to invest in a SSD, and have a Spinning Disk HDD for storage and keep game son the SSD.

 

[jakewat97]

Alex the PC gamer to be honest is very wrong about skyrim, it is a low usage game compared to all the other major games out there and the 7950 is an amazing card and would smoke a 660 ti SC on base clocks and almost begin to compete with a 670. From personal experience my friend has one and he plays BF3 on ultra and gets around 50-60 frames avg. He has the vapor-x variant and says it runs very cool.

an SSD is a great investment and i would reccomend a 128gb intel 520 or vertex 4 along with a barracuda 1tb, put only your OS and important apps on the SSD because the games will load fast anyway if your setup is good. Yes SSD's make games load fast but your 8gb of 1600mhz ram will help it load fast enough to not get stressed over. I say this because SSD's become very expensive once over 128gb storage.

How much can you spend on a mobo? because you may aswell go for a z77 chipset. Here are two good yet reasonably cheap mobos:
ASUS P8Z77-V LK http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131837

ASrock Z77 extreme4 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157293

 

[jvlomax]

Get more ram. Ram is dirt cheap and there is no penalty to have a little more. I Have 16 GB installed and I use around 40%++ of that when running skyrim with mods + some other stuff in the background.

 

[Alex The PC Gamer]

Alex the PC gamer to be honest is very wrong about skyrim, it is a low usage game compared to all the other major games out there...

Skyrim vanilla is fairly easy to run but once you add the graphic mods, the game becomes much harder to run. You can try to tweak the INI files to get a few FPS back but those don't do miracles either. Jake, I'm not sure where I'm wrong in my recommendation.

...and the 7950 is an amazing card and would smoke a 660 ti SC on base clocks and almost begin to compete with a 670.

You can't compare Vcards based on Clocks...you need to benchmark several software (games) to see how well it performs. Here's data to support (or rather contradict your claim): http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7950-review-benchmark,3207-13.html

From personal experience my friend has one and he plays BF3 on ultra and gets around 50-60 frames avg. He has the vapor-x variant and says it runs very cool.

Cool story bro. But you can't compare BF3 to Skyrim (and even less if you throw Mods and INI file tweaks into the mix)...their both running on very different engines.

Edited: I edited on of my post to better explain what I meant by possible slowdowns with the GTX 670 (which is to be careful on which mods to install/add).

To OP: Both cards you've mentioned will be fine if you go through the INI tweaks and carefully select which graphic mods to add the to game. The 7950 w/ 3GB of VRAM is appealing for games like Skyrim but the processing power of the GTX670 is overall more appealing for games in general. The modo you've chosen is perfect if you have no intentions of overclocking and 8 GB of RAM is plenty for today's standards (just make sure you OS is 64 bit to take full advantage of that RAM!).