Not sure whether I should post this in the Mods section or not but I figured its more of a hardware question. I'm getting a new gaming PC after my previous one fried and I had to severely downgrade. I want to start playin' Oblivion again, but with many mods like I used to. I never really used graphics enhancing mods but I want to start with my new rig so I was wondering, purely CPU wise what I should get. Should I go all the way and go with an i7 quad core?

The game doesnt take advantage of dual cores fully so quad cores wont be supported. But Windows will offload other tasks onto the other cores. Example having all Windows tasks on Core 0 and Oblivion on core 1 and maybe a bit of 2. Graphics mods arent too CPU intensive, more on the GPU side. What video card would you be placing in there? And what would be your other option of CPUs. But the Core i7 will surely handle the game fine, but is overkill for Oblivion if thats your only reason.

Its actually gonna be a gaming laptop (need one for college ) so it'll most likely be an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850, or an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 if I need to cut costs.

How much are you looking to spend? (The 5850 is obviously better but only about as powerful as a desktop 5770 if I remember correctly). What laptop are you looking at?

Looking to spend at most $1300, but thats iffy even. There's a few i've been considering: Lenovo y460 (ati 5650; i5 520m) and the Sager NP2180 (also with a 5650). I've also looked at xoticpc and I like their Force 1656-ID5 (ati 5850). I'm still in the process of searching though, far from finished I'm guessing since there are a wealth of options.

This would run Oblivion fine on maxing out the game. For pretty well within budget. Although out of stock for now.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152207

At $1K, this is tough to beat:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5592727&sku=A50-15617&cm_re=Homepage-_-Spot%2003-_-CatId_17_A50-15617

Get it while it's still on sale.

Tig Ol Bitties, thanks for the suggestion I have to some quick research before that sale ends .

And Starforce9, do you think I would still be able to max it out with some graphics mods (QTP3, visible when distant mod, etc.) with the 5650? How much performance would I lose?

With the Radeon 5650? No. Those mods put quite a strain on any system. The GTX 360M would put you in better shape, but still...you will see performance hits with those mods.

And seriously, the notebook I suggested to you was the BEST at that price point. You're not going to get it any better than that. Unfortunately, it looks like it sold out now after only one day.

Notebooks with the Mobility Radeon 5850 are pretty powerful too though.

EDIT: Thee stock for the Asus has come back for the time being

Nope.

Oblivion doesn't use four cores, not even when the operating system is doing minor stuff in the background. Two, maybe three tops, even then. Simple as that.

So yeah, eight threads is about as useful as, oh I don't know, four power supplies or something.

An i3 will be as good as an i5 will be as good as an i7, for the most part, if clock speed (turbo factored in, and no doubt running) is roughly equal. You can apply the same logic to the AMD range, and they're basically as good as the Intel offerings for games like this, only cheaper (especially when including the cost of the motherboard needed).*

* For desktop, that is. But then, for notebooks, I guess power usage is key... might be worth checking idle and load power cunsumption of the various notebook CPUs...

Unless you plan on running encoding software. I run Handbrake video transcoding pretty often and it maxes out on all cores/threads. So the more the better with that, but if games are your only concern, stick to a dual core. With or without hyperthreading, it doesnt matter too much for games.

Oh, absolutely! But then, too, GPUs are picking up where CPUs leave off with some of those things... *

I was only answering the OP's question kinda literally (well, narrowly, I guess). For a number of other things, you could do worse than, say, an i5 760 or (for a bit less money) a Phenom II x4 965 (for desktop). Nice balance for the times, I believe.

Even some games utilise four cores without stopping to so much as ask, and could perhaps use more (virtual or otherwise). Very few, but some, anyway.


* Slooooowly.

Hey I have yet to buy my laptop, but I will be able to officially make the purchase at the end of the month. Quick question: I'm pretty set on this baby right here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220696&cm_re=n61-_-34-220-696-_-Product. Think it'll max out Oblivion...possibly with graphics enhancing mods?

Did your budget drop or something? That notebook you linked is fine for high settings...prehaps even max for vanilla Oblivion, but I expect it's gonna struggle maintaining that with the graphics enhancing mods. The Radoen 5730 is quite a bit slower than the GTX 360M.

Alternatives:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114796
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6646271&CatId=4938
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152196
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220700
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5592727&CatId=3998

Haha, yes my budget did drop to $1,000 maximum due to circumstances, unfortunately. So the only alternative you've provided (thanks a whole for the suggestions by the way) would be the Qosmio. So the Toshiba would be a better alternative to the ASUS, even considering the ASUS has an i7?

You're merely making a tradeoff. The Core i7 is not going to gain you much in performance with this game, or most games for that matter, considering it doesn't even utilize quads. The GTX 360M is much faster than the Mobility Radeon 5730 though and will get you better performance. The other thing is size...the Toshiba is a bigger notebook.

Just for your knowledge, the Core i5 430M is a fast dual-core chip that also has Hyperthreading technology in it giving it a total of 4 threads.

Well found the GX640-260US for $1,070 no tax and free shipping (at that price it is a viable option) so I am now caught between it and the Toshiba Qosmio. I've pretty much ruled out the ASUS. What do you think between the Qosmio and the GX640?

Both are going to be nice. The Toshiba has a considerably larger screen though, so make sure that won't be a problem for you...it may end up being the deciding factor. The Toshiba also comes with a 12-cell battery vs the 9-cell for the MSI. I personally like the MSI more for the size.

Yea size doesn't matter to me, a bigger screen might be preferable actually since the notebook isn't going to come off of my desk too much. The only conflict for me is the MSI's Radeon 5850 versus the Toshiba's GTS 360M, and that I've read about the GX640 having issues with heat.

The Radeon 5850 does heat up a bit more than the 360M, but with any gaming capable notebook, you're gonna have some heating up. Space constraints doesn't allow much for airflow. Both video chips are about on par with one another in terms of performance.

Yea I thought the 5850 was a better card, but if that's not the case, looks like I'll go with the Qosmio (glad I finally made a choice, so much damn research). I'll be ordering in a few days, thanks a whole lot for your help.

Well I've received my Qosmio in the mail. The one I purchased is identical to the x505-Q860 besides having a Core i5-450m instead of the Core i5 430m (model i bought is the x505-q885). I loaded up Oblivion and tested it on max settings, no mods. In wilderness areas i get no less than 40 fps, most times in the mid-50s, which is great. But inside Chorrol, particularly when I'm facing a number of NPCs, it drops to about 20-23 fps. This is without AA but with HDR. When I force 8x AA on with HDR through the nvidia control panel, fps in wilderness areas where I previously got 40+ fps drops to approximately 18-23 fps. I was pretty confident the game would max out and play relatively well on this machine no matter what, on vanilla settings for that matter. Is this to be expected??

Laptop by big name manufacturer..... You can probably pick up a fair bit of performance by turning off a bunch of the proprietary crapware installed from the factory. Oblivion is horribly processor dependent, and it is more about speed, and how much it is doing besides the game, than anything else. L2 cache figures in there pretty good too..... but, that's getting deeper than we need to at this point. Start by 'streamlining' your laptop. Turn off bloatware you don't need. Disable the lot of it from starting with windows. A tweak guide for your O/S is a good plan as well. There are quite a few services that run in the background, not all of which you need. Check out http://www.blackviper.com/, and find the guide for your O/S. Read thru it, get an understanding of what you are doing, before you change anything. If you aren't sure if you need something or not, do more research, or, just leave it alone.

Start there. Getting the most from your game, starts with getting the most from your hardware.

Make sure you didn't turn on transparency antialiasing. It causes huge slowdown in oblivion with all the foliage and trees.

On top of this, may want to lay off the AA too. I mean 8x AA is a bit much and can take a huge performance hit in itself...I personally don't see much difference past 4x.