Skyrim: Hardware
To run all the mods featured in this guide with good performance I recommend the following hardware (or something equivalent) as a base starting point. These suggestions are what I would consider budget-friendly while still meeting the requirements of tricking out Skyrim and maintaining a respectable 40fps or greater.
I recommend building your own PC instead of buying a more expensive pre-built "gaming" machine from the likes of Dell, Ibuypower or Alienware. It's actually very easy to do. You'll benefit by getting a more powerful machine for less money and you'll feel more comfortable with upgrading and maintaining your new hardware. Not to mention, it feels pretty good to have built your own PC and to know exactly what went into it. To get started visit the Build a PC sub-reddit on Reddit.com for tips and examples of PC builds and then visit PCPartPicker to begin shopping for compatible components at the lowest prices.
Next up, the Clean Start guide for Skyrim.
- Intel Core i5-3350P or Intel Core i5-3570K - The 3350P is adequate if you have no intention of overclocking a CPU while the i5-3570K is the base recommendation for an overclock-friendly CPU. If you're a power gamer and cannot play games with less than 60fps and have deep pockets consider a faster CPU such as the Intel Core i7-4770K which is ideal for overclocking. Skyrim is a CPU intensive game and benefits greatly from a fast CPU.
- 8 GB of RAM - The game doesn't directly benefit from having more than 4GB of system RAM but 8GB is pretty standard these days and you'll want that extra memory if you plan on running other programs alongside such as video recorders and performance monitors.
- 256 GB SSD - While not essential, solid state drives will speed up PC startup, Windows operation and Skyrim loading times. A 120 GB SSD is large enough to house Windows and a fully modded Skyrim but it leaves no room for other large games or backups of all the mods. (I currently have a 120 GB SSD as my primary drive for gaming and use several 500 GB HDDs to store additional programs and files including backups of my Skyrim mods.)
- GeForce GTX 760 4 GB or Radeon 7970 HD 3 GB - You could definitely get by with a minimum of 2 GB of VRAM but 3 or 4 GB ensures that with a plethora of HD textures added, the only memory bottleneck will be the game itself. For a better GPU the GeForce GTX 770 or the more expensive 780 are excellent options. (Independent benchmark tests of Skyrim consistently show that nVidia GPUs outperform equivalent Radeon GPUs.)
I recommend building your own PC instead of buying a more expensive pre-built "gaming" machine from the likes of Dell, Ibuypower or Alienware. It's actually very easy to do. You'll benefit by getting a more powerful machine for less money and you'll feel more comfortable with upgrading and maintaining your new hardware. Not to mention, it feels pretty good to have built your own PC and to know exactly what went into it. To get started visit the Build a PC sub-reddit on Reddit.com for tips and examples of PC builds and then visit PCPartPicker to begin shopping for compatible components at the lowest prices.
Next up, the Clean Start guide for Skyrim.