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Saved as ODT. See if you can open that. If you make your suggestions/comments obvious, I can add them to the word version. Perhaps we can eventually convert to openOffice as well, but I am not as familiar with that prog.

@Fri & All Added a small Note to the end of the mods section of the SIG pointing to the steps necessary to simply revert to a clean Skyrim installation in the event of a modding error (or a severe OCD attack during modding ;) ). I considered moving this entirely from the WBG to the SIG (and addinga link-to from the WBG), but it seemed too out of context, as I could not find a "natural" point to insert that section. Why the hell am I thinking about this you say? Well, I am working on the STEP PDF Project guide, and this is useful info for STEPers, irrespective of using a mod manager of any kind or not. In the event of an issue, they need to know how to clean up and start over quickly and easily. @STEP Team, Let me know if you need access to Roogal's STEP share on DropBox.

My findings confirm that ONLY textures\landscape\trees\treepineforestbranchcomp.dds affects this mid-distance tree fill effect. I will add this one to the exclusions list in the DDSopt guide.

On my board, the BIOS guide indicates that when RAID is enabled, ACHI is turned on by default as well. I have three settings 1) IDE, 2) ACHI & 3) RAID

Don't alt-tab to GPU-z. Turn on logging and look at the log file when you exit. I posted a proposed standard somewhere on these forums. Cross reference my name with GPU-z in a search of the forums.

I think you are fine for 1600, and do purchase a decent fan for $30-$50 before attempting to OC at all, even a little. .... unless you are planning to upgrade your mobo soon, as that mobo will not accept any chip better than the i5-760, so may as well preserve that!

Install GPU-z and check your VRAM using that. I cannot tell by the PerfMon what your dedicated/dynamic VRAM useage is. GPU-z should be our standard for measuring this I think, or at lease use it in conjuction so that we can determine what PerfMon is telling us.

Vond, your board supports Advanced Host Controller Interface. All P55 chipsets should. That board basically has the same config as mine.

you never can say for sure without finding out explicitly, but I suspect your mobo can run 1600 as it is a standard config (strange, but usually that 2200 you have is replaced by a 1600... wondering if that is a typo??). Dig into the online tech spec for your board and see if you can't find a cross ref. Alternatively, go to the Corsair site and plug in your mobo to check for compatibility. You may be able to determine indirectly that way. You also want to get a better fan before you overclock at all. Also a roomy case is very helpful.

Would appreciate a tried & True methodology for getting Windows Boot & Temp files to be maintained on a partition apart from the OS partition.

OK, good. AHCI is not a problem for my board, just wanted to be sure I was not bottlenecking an SSD

Both are very fast, so I am maxed already. Just want to know about SSDs, and if it is worth purchase, given my 3 Gb/s constraint.EDIT: I guess I responded to a post meant for Vond, so disregard above gibberish

I'll give it a shot too sometime this year :P

+1, even better I have a 2x RAID0 config (with partitions), so effectively only 2 drives. I'd like to get an teeny-tiny SSD for #2 above. Actually, I'd like 3 SSDs, but my mobo only supports 3 Gb/s theoretical transfer rate (I assume my board supports SSD natively or with BIOS update). This is still a very fast transfer rate, but I assume that it referrs to the entire BUS and not each SATA port. Any input on 3 Gb/s transfer rate & SSD, Fri?

An ideal pagefile would be split into two parts, each the size of your installed RAM (or 75% of RAM), and would be situated at the beginning of physical drives used solely for media storage (you can accomplish this by creating small partitions at the beginning of each drive). Even, better, you could use one tiny SSD I would think for your pagefile. This keeps paging from thrashing your OS and game drives... however, with 8 Gb of RAM, I would think that paging out is rare. The main thing is to get Steam and games OFF of the OS drive and onto something fast and physically independent from the OS.

What do you think of that?I MOVED Skyrim on to my SSD (SteamMover) which has windows on it, but my steam client is still on my HDD. So if I install Steam onto my SSD and move all the other games onto my HDD, this would probably have the same effect as the guy described in his post, wouldn't it? This advice has been in the Skyrim Installation Guide since day one and the intent to do videos and graphics was written into the description. The bit about moving game and steam off of the OS drive makes good sense if pagefile.sys is located on the OS drive or yet another drive... does Skyrim page out by default or does it try to stay in system RAM?? Anyway, that poster's comment about "if you are running out of VRAM on your GPU..." makes no sense unless he is using this as a proxy to conclude that paging occurs at VRAM max (which also does not make sense to me). Any comments on these observations?

What is your mobo? I also use that exact same processor. It is highly OC-able, and I have gone from 2.8 to 4.0 GHz, completely stable. Pretty significant performance increase too. My temps NEVER get above 75C and that only rarely when I am running Prime or stressing the CPU for stability testing. I can give you specs that work well for the DP55KG mobo (my board), but you will need to pick up some quality RAM capable of running @ 1600. I use a particularly high-spec Corsair variety (with XMP) that I can recommend (7-8-7-20). My ENB results (do the same for a good compare). Similar specs could also work for your board though. My mobo is a Gigabyte P55-USB3. I do have RAm capable of running at 1600 and higher (8gb Corsair Vengeance that are capable of running @ 1866, and 4gb of Corsair XMS3 that can go up to 1600. I only have stock cooling on the CPU, and have a Fractal Design Refine R3 chassi, again just with the coolers that came with it. Would be very interested anyways in safe OCing. :)I did run the ENB test, but that was before getting new HDD and the 8gb Corsair Vengeance RAM that I picked up last week, so will have another go. Got 12.61 last time. Sorry, but I predict not boost at all from your new purchases :( I am getting +5 on you due to my OC and my Xfire (assuming you don't do SLI/Xfire) I also use a CoolerMaster v8 air cooler (adjustable), and this is about as good as it gets with air cooling. I also have a Cooler Master HAF 932 full tower with 3 6-inch stock fans in it. Very quiet and LOTS of air flow.

Correct, Turbo is Intel's auto OCing system. You can control V-droop as well, and there are many fine-tuning options.... the P55-Extreme Intel boards are some of the best for OCing. Just google DP55KG and overclock. Here are the doc for that board

What is your mobo? I also use that exact same processor. It is highly OC-able, and I have gone from 2.8 to 4.0 GHz, completely stable. Pretty significant performance increase too. My temps NEVER get above 75C and that only rarely when I am running Prime or stressing the CPU for stability testing. I can give you specs that work well for the DP55KG mobo (my board), but you will need to pick up some quality RAM capable of running @ 1600. I use a particularly high-spec Corsair variety (with XMP) that I can recommend (7-8-7-20). My ENB results (do the same for a good compare). Similar specs could also work for your board though.

Ditto Monty's post.

weird stuff going on with your setup MW. I think it is worth a full uninstall/reinstall just to be sure (yes, this is my answer to just about everything ;) )

I think there may also be a difference between hardware and software threads. I also am fuzzy on threading, so will educate myself on this. 45 seems like way too many, so I am skeptical that the app is reporting accurately. EDIT: Check out THIS THREAD

My advice would be to install everything marked CORE only, and use the 1k textures (rather than 2k) whenever available. If you are stable with this, you can expound upon that, but learn to use Wrye Bash or Mod Organizer first.

Good qualification, Monty. I will test as well (someday) quantitatively and report my findings. I envision a "Skyrim Tweaking Guide: Facts & Fiction" in the future ...

Be sure to use "Bashed Patch, Skyrim.esp" under Mopy/templates