I have a fairly beefy system...AMD dual core 2.9ghz machine...4 gig ram...PCI Express Nvidia 9600 GT OC, et etc, but I find I still get crappy performance from the game when I start boosting the sliders toward anything more than halfway....even having distant lands turned on is enough to start causing FPS to dramatically drop.

So, I've been grabbing every polygon reducer and texture optimizer I could find, and am at this moment running Pyffi on my meshes folder...but I find myself wondering if there are more, popular mods out there.

So, can folks list all the good mods/utilities they are using to lower the stress on their system while still having it look good?

Have you checked out the http://sites.google.com/site/ballofflame/theoblivionperformanceproject?