I am thinking of buying a gaming PC for Skyrim, and I wondered if a PC with these specs would be likely to be able to run it.

Intel Core i7-960 Quad Core 3.2Ghz
8GB DDR3 RAM
1536MB Nvidia GeForce GTX 580
1TB Hard Drive

If anyone knowledgeable about PC gaming could help, it would be much appreciated.

Requirements aren't out yet, but I can assure you it will be able.

Well we don't know the system reqs yet, but I imagine that yes, yes it would.

Dude, even IF Skyrim would require high system specs, how much more would you want than your suggested rig?
This thread is ridiculous.

Since you haven't actually bought it yet, I'll add that maybe you could decide to wait a little bit before you decide. There's supposed to be a new generation out in about April, I think, codename Bulldozer. AMD is promising the world about it.. it could be business as usual or it could be big. Either way.. it could affect the prices. I'm also going to upgrade soon, but not before I see how that plays out.

Great, thanks for the advice. Thanks also to everyone who added something constructive to the thread.

Here are the minimum and recommended specs for a few other 2011 releases

To be honest, if the computer spec in the opening post won't run Skyrim on max, then there is little hope for the rest of us

That computer should be able to play every game full detail at just about any resolution you can have on a monitor.

No it will not be able to just run it... :brokencomputer:

it will only give you an awsome time with Skyrim, if you even care about that :shrug:

No problem. Don't want to dissuade you or anything. The system you picked sounds very powerful no matter what AMD's bulldozer turns out to be. But since I'm also looking at upgrades, I thought I'd throw the info out there. Additional info is always good when making a choice.

Thanks again folks, I am a novice when it comes to PC gaming, I have only played consoles, so any and all feedback is much appreciated.

indeed the best thing right now is to wait till AMD throws some healthy competition around for intel's ix's... means lower prices for us

I can safely say that will be fine for Skyrim. Also, you want a Triple Channel Kit 6GB or 9GB [Hint: 6GB is fine and it doesn't even be that fast. Gaming performance improves little to none on speeds above 1333MHz and Triple-Channel provides ridiculous amounts of bandwidth.] Secondly, SLI GTX 460 1GB will a good deal cheaper and be faster than the GTX580... SLI GTX 560 will be less cheaper, but more faster still.

If you want to do real fast on the cheap, get an i5 760 and Crossfire a pair of HD6850 or SLI a pair of GTX 460 [verify mobo compatibility]. You can build for like ~$1000.

Bioware's people are almost as hardware-ignorant as Bethesda's seem to be. With regard to their announced video graphics card requirements, the two minimum cards are in conflict presently (as to how they would benchmark).

The Geforce 7900 GS is a five year old card roughly equivalent to the Radeon X1800 Pro, or the four year old HD 2600 XT cards. It is a lot faster than the Radeon HD 2600 Pro, but it also has much poorer image quality and a far less effective shader capability. The Geforce 7800 GS is much closer in speed to the HD 2600 Pro. Personally, I think that they should have named the Geforce 8600 GTS, and forgot all about the Geforce 7n00 generation, just the way they seemed to want to omit the Radeon X1n00 generation.

Probably on low settings

Welcome to the PC then ^^
the way the game handles is usually different, but the gameplay always seems to be on a completely different scale. And since its a bethesda game, expect a lot of mods to be released, which can seriously improve the experience.