I am planning on purchasing the collector's edition of Skyrim. But i want to upgrade my PC before purchasing the game.

My goals concerning Skyrim is this:

- I want to run Skyrim on my PC with all the graphics settings(including the AA settings) completly maxed out.
- By the time i will be playing Skyrim, i will be using a 42 or 52 inch LCD HD TV and i will be playing this game on a 1080p rezolution(assuming the game will have that rez setting in the graphics options.)

After googling it out i have found that the "official" recomended system requirements is this:
* OS: Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
* CPU: Core 2 Quad 3 GHz
* RAM: 3 GB
* HDD: 15 GB free disk space
* Graphics: 512 MB Graphics Memory
* Sound Card: DirectX 9 Compatible
* DirectX: Version 9.0c

My PC meets all the requirements, except for the CPU. My current CPU is this: Intel® Core™2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz

I have the 3GB of ram, currently have Windows Vista 32 bit, I have a 512MB graphics card(the 8800 Geforce video card from Nvidia), my sound card is fine.

Concerning equipping my PC to max out the graphics settings my question is this:
In order for my PC to run this game on maxed out graphics, and on a 1080p rez, is the CPU the only thing i need to upgrade or will my current hardware/software be enough for the game to run smoothly?

Concerning running Skyrim with my current CPU:
Will i still be able to run the game fine if i decide not to upgrademy CPU?

Depends on how well optimized the game engine is. My take on it would be, wait until you actually have the game, and see how it plays.

First off, upgrading a CPU requires a little more research and information than your current one. IF it's SM2 Socket and you have a 300Watt PSU, you'll need to upgrade your PSU and you'll be limited to SM2 (around a Phenom II X4 @ 2.7-3.2ghz would be the first CPU from the top of my memory that may work - and is a great CPU). Which, should be enough considering you're on a 32 bit system. But do note : the best upgrade, on games, is the GPU. So get off the 8800 bandwagon, find something that'll fit with your current PSU (or upgrade your PSU) and you're good to go.

I'm not too familiar with PC abbreviations, but asssuming "PSU" means power supply unit, I have an 800 watt power supply unit. I only became a PC gamer because of the fact that you can mod your games and the games tend to be better quality in graphic, etc. I don't know much about PCs but i am slowly trying to teach myself. I wasn't aware of making sure that your CPU and Video card 'fits' together properly. I'll go ahead and google the matter out. From one PC gamer to another, when i'm shopping for a CPU and video card, how do i know that they fit together? For example, when i put my PC together 3 years ago i basically based my componet shopping list of the system requirements i read off the back of Crysis Wars when it first came out. I'm basically trying to upgrade my PC(if i really need to) specifally for Skyrim.

Oh, and if this helps you, my motherboard is an ASUS P5KC.

He has an intel cpu, socket LGA 775. The amd processor won't go in there at all. Without changing the system board as well, I think the best processor he can get in there would be the Q9550, which is 2.8 ghz. 12mb L2 cache though... so, a bit of an improvement, but, not worth the 300 bucks they seem to want for it....

Upgrading the GPU is indeed a good plan though.