Recommended upgrades for Skyirm with STEP

[nico53laval]

I've got an OCed Gigabyte Gtx 670 (1360 MHz core and 6492 for the mem max) and a Phenom II *4 965 BE @3800 MHz with 4 gigs of RAM. I'm sometimes dropping under 60 FPS with STEP, ultra settings (high shadows) + 2* SSAA performance ambient occlusion. What component do you think is to blame and what should I do to resolve this (small) issue? Also, I wanted to buy an SSD to fix the painfully long loading times, can I just copy over Skyrim from my HDD to the SSD for it to work with skse?

[Neovalen]

Thanks for the reply frihyland, actually looked at a few reviews and 8x/8x pci-e 3.0 shouldn't botteneck my 670 cards as they don't use up the full bandwidth unless I'm mistaken? I was looking into getthing this board.

[Neovalen]

Thank you to everyone who contributed know-how to help with my build. Here is what I ended up with after much anguish and research:

 

Case: COOLER MASTER HAF X RC-942-KKN1 Black Steel/ Plastic ATX Full Tower Computer Case

Power Supply: CORSAIR Professional Series HX750 (CMPSU-750HX) 750W ATX12V 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS SILVER Certified

Motherboard: GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 3 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Extended ATX Intel Motherboard

Processor: Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4000 BX80637I53570K

Processor Cooler: COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 EVO RR-212E-20PK-R2

Processor Thermal Compound: Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound

Memory: CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMZ16GX3M2A1600C10

Video Cards: 2 EVGA 04G-P4-2673-KR GeForce GTX 670 Superclocked+ w/Backplate 4GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 in SLI

SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 Series - MAX IOPS Edition VTX3MI-25SAT3-120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) *Reused from my old cpu*

Hard Drive (Data): Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKX 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

 

Expected Arrival Date For All Components: 6/28/2012.

[stoppingby4now]

Thanks for that read sb4n. So from what I've read I've learned:

 

1. Ivy Bridge runs a little hotter than Sandy Bridge when overclocked, so will not achieve same Ghz level but performance will be the same-ish with less power draw.

2. Ivy Bridge has a few extra features such as built in graphics (great for those times when your video card goes out to test), more PCI-E 3.0 lanes, etc.

 

So I think Ivy Bridge is the right way to go instead of buying a generation back, even if I don't quite get the same Ghz numbers as Sandy Bridge. That sound about right?

 

No real flaw in that logic. Especially since you have two video cards, you have far more choices in MB's to support the full PCI-e x16 bandwidth on more than one lane.

[stoppingby4now]

 

The general recommendation is that if you already have an overclockable sandy bridge there is absolutely no reason to buy an ivy bridge any pre sandy bridge chips could receive substantial benefit from an upgrade.

Whish is awesome as I am a sandy guy :D

 

And it does handle Skyrim quite nicely ...

 

I thought you had an i7 core? Or did you upgrade?