I am about to buy a new computer and wanted to know the forum's opinion on the utility of a couple of components for optimized game play with a heavily modded FCOM Oblivion install. I am not trying to buy the best gaming machine on the market, but want to get a really good work horse computer that will also let me play Oblivion the way I want to with whatever texture or graphics improvements mods I like without having to suffer a performance hit. (I will want to use this same machine for Skyrim - but I have not even looked at that game's requirements yet.) Any feedback would be appreciated.

Base System:
Dell XPS 8500
Intel i7-3770 processor
Blu-ray combo drive
Bose Companion 2 Speakers
Logitech MX 550 cordless mouse & keyboard
2TB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive 6.0 Gb/s

1. OS - Is there any utility in getting Windows 8 Pro vs the standard Windows 8?

2. Ram - I know more is always better, but is 16GB of dual channel DDR3 at 1600 MHz good enough? Put differently, am I likely to see any noticeable game performance increase with 24GB over the 16?

3. Sound card - In older computers, it was a good idea to have a stand alone sound card to reduce the work load from the main system, but is that still necessary? The computer I am looking at comes with integrated 7.1 with WaveMAXX 4 onboard card. I am tempted to get another stand alone Sound Blaster card, but am willing to forego it if it no longer has much impact on game performance.

4. Video Card - The Dell comes with an NVidia GeForce GT 640 1 GB GDDR5 for Win 8. Is this sufficient for Oblivion's best graphics mods or do I need a second card. (My current computer has two NVidea GeForce 9800 GT w/512MB cards).

Thanks again

I'd get an SSD for your main drive (big enough for OS, programs, and a few games, at least) and a burlier, single GPU with 2+ GB dedicated memory. Skyrim should already run fine, but those two components will improve your overall computing experience and, of course, chew up games faster. If you're throwing money at your system, I'd also look into a 1600p monitor (twice the definition of 1080p) and put one of those dual-link DVI ports to use. All games look amazing in such high resolution and then your PC experience will still kick PS4's/XBox 720's azz for the next decade as they're not going to pump out more than 1080p natively.

Your audio is probably fine, so I'd not worry about getting a dedicated sound card as long as your onboard audio is functional.

Neither Oblivion nor Skyrim will see any performance improvement with 24 vs.16GB RAM. Still, with 24GB RAM, you could throw either game onto a RamDisk which is leagues faster than even a state of the art SSD.

If your Dell will let you overclock, you could crank up that i7 (carefully).