Template:Notice by frihyland & S.T.E.P. Team
GUIDE FORUM THREAD
This is a hardware guide to help you decide what will give you the greatest performance boost within a generic price range. However, it is more than that. You will gain knowledge and understanding of these system components, learn why they are important, and even general installation guidelines. It is not a guide of required hardware to run Skyrim; though, for reference each section will outline Skyrim's official system requirements in regards to that section. You will also find a general recommendation to be able to run STEP is all it's glory. This guide is written with the assumption that you have basic computer building skills and general knowledge of the system components.
When reading this guide please keep in mind the official minimum system requirements will only get you playing the game and nothing else. The official recommended system requirements will only get you playing the game on medium to high settings. To play Skyrim on ultra settings with a full STEP installation, you will need the STEP recommended hardware or higher.
All price ranges are given in US currency($). We will do our best to keep this information accurate; however, depending on when our last review was, it is possible for some components to be inaccurately placed within price ranges. STEP and the community makes no guarantees on pricing. Furthermore, although all technical information is fact, all recommendations from this guide are strictly opinion written/edited by multiple individuals from personal experience or from generally accepted practices. Ultimately, it is the individual's responsibility to check specific pricing and use their best judgement when accepting or not accepting recommendations.
Quad-core CPU as close to 3GHz as possible and up to 4GHz. The Intel i-series processors are among the best in the business providing exceptional performance while remaining power efficient. They are the CPU of choice of the STEP community.
Skyrim is incredibly dependent on a fast processor, to such an extent that even with the fastest available processor you will still very often find it to be the limiting performance factor in your game. In order to accommodate a new processor, you often have to buy a new motherboard, which can severely effect the "bang-for-your-buck" aspect of upgrading your CPU. The minimum recommendations for upgrading when purchasing for AMD you'll want an FX-Series (Zambezi) or for Intel a Core I5 (Ivy Bridge) unless you already have a sandy bridge in which case just stick with it. The closer you can get to 4Ghz (higher is faster) the better and as for multi-core, Skyrim uses the first 2 pretty effectively and after that the value for each additional core seems to be geometrically diminished.
*This is for a base install only! Patches will require up to 500MB of additional space. DLC will require up to an additional 6GB.
STEP recommends having up to at least 15GB of free disk space depending on the content you install. A SSD is also recommended for best performance.
Skyrim requires 9 GB of hard drive space un-modded, and you can easily triple that with heavy modding. Skyrim has a great many loading screens, and you can greatly diminish the time spent on these screens by installing Skyrim on an SSD (solid-state drive), as well as increasing overall stability and performance of the game. If you do not have an SSD the next best thing would be to install an extremely fast traditional drive or a RAID0 array (Caution: RAID0 can be unstable longterm, see here for details). When Purchasing an SSD SATA 6 GB/s is what your looking for (at $1/GB) and make sure your motherboard supports it natively through AHCI (set it up to use AHCI in BIOS as it is never the default, and must be done before OS detection), otherwise you will find your uber-SSD running in emulated IDE mode.
DirectX 11 compatible video card with at least 1.5GB of dedicated VRAM. (more information to come)
The video card is easily the most expensive part of a gaming computer and thus although it is quite critical, when formulating a performance/price scale it move quite dramatically.
Video cards need DirectX 9 support with a minimum of 1GB of VRAM to run Skyrim, although 2-4GB is highly preferable. Here the GPU although still critical, is much less important than the total VRAM, and SLI/Crossfire can be helpful for an fps boost particularly if using Ultra settings and Post Processors (but certainly not enough to warrant buying another card, unless you have at least 2-4GB on each card and want to run in 3D or Multiple Monitor Mode).
Minimum recommended GPU models are the Nvidia GTX 550TI or ATI HD 6850 each with 2GB VRAM (these are last seasons mid-range models with a boosted VRAM and available fairly cheap at ~$150, 1GB versions run only $35 less and you will hate yourself if you skimp here). PCIe 3.0 x16 support would be nice here but certainly not necessary (unless you are spending $500 or more), but a PCIe 2.0 with a full x16 dedicated bandwidth is a really good idea, check your motherboard for this support.
To run a complete STEP Installation no more than 4GB of system RAM should be needed.
As for system memory 4GB is the baseline "required", and 8GB will create a much more stable Skyrim when heavily modded. If your system runs out of VRAM (see below) it resorts to using your system memory somewhat inefficiently, so if you plan on using HD mods make sure you have at least 6GB. If you have less than 4GB move this to the top of the list, RAM is almost free right now and its a highly volatile market so it won't stay that way forever, so knock yourself out. Always buy RAM in a kit (a set of RAM designed to work together much faster and more stable). Consult your motherboards list of supported models (and update the bios to latest) before purchase, this can lead to a new motherboard purchase if new faster and less expensive memory models are not supported. Note that a 64 bit OS is required to make us of more than 4GB of system RAM.
Most of the recommended upgrades require certain specs on your mother board. Besides those specific specs, the chipsets are the defining factors here: for AMD you want 900 series chipsets, on the Intel side Z77.
A word on Windows 64-bit: while not necessary, x64 will allow you to add more than 4GB of system RAM and that will increase stability in your games. I would not recommend 64-bit XP and especially Vista as they are fairly buggy in regards to hardware and games, neglecting the benefits of the RAM increase.
Template:Notice The following chart lists cards by GPU power and sorts them into tiers along with a range of appropriate VRAM amounts required to get the best performance/price value.
First check your own video cards model and specs, if your card is on the table already you don't need to upgrade unless you have less than 1GB VRAM. If not peruse for an upgrade in your price range. Note that if you upgrade from one model on this list to another, jumping at least 3 tiers is recommended in order to actually be able to 'feel' the upgrade, anything less is fairly trivial.
Not all models will be available with recommended VRAM as that is entirely up to manufacturers, it's up to you to find one with the appropriate VRAM specs. Also be aware that these are seriously oversimplified recommendations, all types of different configurations are available for each model, I am just suggesting a rather idealized upgrade path, don't hesitate to buy a card (if you feel its a good price) just because its slightly below the ideal.
Dual Chip boards are not listed, if you have one you should be fine as long as you have at least 2GB (1GB for each chip), if you are buying one, make sure to get 4GB (2GB for each chip).
Price listings are just what I was able to find with a quick online search and are meant as examples not definitive in any way (if the VRAM is less than recommended I provide the available amount).
My personal conclusion at this point is that for ballsout graphics without sending you to the poorhouse (and future-proof for 4 years) a GTX 670 4GB (of Samsung DDR5) priced at $400 is the way to go, it may be several months before we see this but I am a patient man. The 670 is only 4% slower than the 680 and has much less cooling issues, the Samsung DDR5 is proving to be much faster and more reliable than other vendors and 4GB should be sufficient to guarantee 4 years of usefulness. Go to Toms Hardware if your looking for a comprehensive chart, it was used as a primary information source.
