I don't know anything about building PC's but I will say this for anyone building a new one the graphics in Skyrim are certainly on par with Uncharted 3 if not better depending on your tastes. And I'm not sure if the screens from the magazine were taken on 360, Ps3 or PC so I would aim for a PC that can run a game on max with no problem that has graphics similar to Uncharted 2. :shrug:

Edit* on another graphical note make sure your PC can handle vista's. According to the article no more muddy textures 50 feet away like in Oblivion. You can see very, very far off and everything looks incredible and detailed.

I doubt that it's going to be too demanding. Chances are the GI screens were taken with a console version, which devs often do since PC graphics are generally better on max than anything a current gen console can handle. That said, I'm hoping for everyone's sake that the engine has scalable graphics so even people with older computers can enjoy the game, while it still looks kickass on newer PCs (think: Crysis).

I am not worried that my computer won't be able to handle it. It probably won't be able to run on max with like 3243534 FPS, but I'm confident that it will run decently on full graphics, as I have 8GB of RAM, a pretty damn good GPU and a decent CPU.

Buy a new one. A good new one ( I suggest a 6870 as a great mid range or GTX 570 if you can spend some more) have DirectX 11 support and are simply much more powerful than a 9800GT even a SLI configuration.

My suggestion, don't buy the new Sandy Bridge or other new processors when they first come out. You will pay much more than you should. You can get a quad core 3 ghz AMD CPU for $100, was looking at newegg over the weekend. You don't need six cores, so don't even bother with those right now.

Make sure you do your homework before you buy as you can build an AMD based system much cheaper than an Intel system. The cost itself is why I'm sticking with AMD.

Indeed. There isn't even much that can use x4 processors at this time, Oblivion certainly can't. Same with RAM. Hopefully they'll be able to give us a 64 bit EXE.

It's not the quad-core that matters. Most high-end CPUs are quad-core anyway. It's that Sandy Bridge is 20-25% faster clock-for-clock over the previous generation. That's huge.

Oblivion was very CPU-bound at times, especially with lots of NPCs, and mods that add more NPCs.

Combine that with the "K" version of the high-end Sandy Bridge, and you can go to 5GHz if you so choose. That's a lot more future proof (I know, I hate the term) than an AMD chip that doesn't OC as well and doesn't perform as well clock-for-clock. 3.0GHz on AMD might be something like 2.4GHz on Sandy Bridge, but I haven't done the math.

I'm no Intel fan boy either, I go where the performance goes. My first builds were AMD, back when they were better than the P4. I will of course go to Bulldozer if there is a sizable performance advantage.

Thanks everyone. Great ideas. Yes, I do plan on waiting till later in the year for this build, but I don't want to wait too long in case I run into any technical problems. It will be interesting to see where the new tech goes. What I don't want to happen is what happened last time around. I built a machine from scratch right before Oblivion came out. I put together I nice system, near top of the line, but Oblivion brought that rig to it's knees. I rremember AMD was pretty much killing Intel at the time, and I got one of the first true Dual core processors. I believe it was the X2 line, I put 2 gigs of ram in it, which was a lot at the time. I also had 2 more slots available for up to 4 gigs, which was crazy at the time. For video, I picked up the Geforce 7800gt, not quite what the GTX was, but it was still a near top of the line card at the time. I remember the recommended specs being Geforce 6800 for video, but there's no way that card was going to get the job done for this game. I spent about $1,800 for that rig, so it was a little disappointing. It was a great little machine, but Oblivion was just ridiculous! Anyway, I know this time around, it shouldn't be that way. I believe Bethesda will have the game better optimized. Also, the Xbox 360 was brand new tech so they were trying to build something with something that was brand new. This time we are closer to the end of this generation cycle, so I'm hoping that will make things much easier for the PC gamer. Hopefully, I can put together something nice. It's payback Bethesda! You hear me. I'm not letting Skyrim bring me to my knees again! So, the more ideas the better. As time goes on, maybe we'll have a better idea of what the most ideal build for this game will be. But for now, I suppose we'll just have to guess. The more ideas the better.

There's also this fact: The requirements didn't get higher generally as they did before.I mean,the games that put Gtx 250's as the minimum haven't come yet,did they? Of course there's no guarantee that this pace'll go on but my personal opinion is that it's likely for now.
A friend of mine got himself a near 1500 $ PC before Oblivion came and still going on with that,without sacrificing graphic quality or FPS that much.I bet that he won't need an upgrade for Skyrim either...On the other hand,I,making cheap but small upgrades throught the years,have probably paid more than he did in total,plus the effort...:sadvaultboy:

Yeah, wait until they release specs. I'm an AMD guy, because they're still beating nVidia in graphics, and Intel is still in that indecisive mood about what CPU ports they should use, plus AMD is cheaper.

They are? By what measure? I don't belong to either camp, I go where the performance is, and numbers don't lie. The 6970 is great, much better than the 5xxx They went from 1 primitives/clock to 2 primitives/clock with their architectural changes, but this doesn't quite reach Nvidia's 4 primitives/clock. AMD also seems to not care much about tessellation performance, Nvidia has them beat by quite a bit there. And the 6970 seldom outperforms the 580 in game benches. I've read the entire Anandtech review of the 6970 many times.

Also, what scares me about the 6970 architectural changes is http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/4. They basically have to make new drivers for this change, and that means buggy and unoptimized. But if they stick with VLIW4 then it will eventually even out...

So they may be mostly neck-and-neck, but the 580 still edges out. Especially if you take raw triangle throughput (and tessellation throughput) into account. I personally care about this a lot because I'm programming my own DirectX 11 renderer. Nothing fancy yet, though.

HD 5970 is the best performing card today.Followed by GTX580.I don't belong to either camp as well,but this could be a criteria...Though,AMD having the strongest GPU on the market doesn't mean that they have better CPU's also.Not that their CPU's are bad or won't be enough for your needs,but as far as I know their best CPU is topped by average i7's...AMD CPU's are cheaper though,indeed.

Uh, the 5970 is a bit unfair, in that it's... Dual-GPU... A fair comparison is the 6970 to the 580...

Not to mention the 5970 costs $800-$1000, which is almost twice that of the GTX 580..

AND, if you look at the Anandtech review for the 6970, the 580 comes within a small percentage of the 5970, despite the 5970 having TWO GPUs, sometimes even beating the 5970.

Fastest single card? Technically.
Fastest single GPU? Disqualified, since it's Dual GPU.

Besides, it's not long until Nvidia comes out with the GTX 595, which is two 570/580s on one card.

Edit: You can http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/13. The Performance/$ is much much higher on the GTX 580. Comes within 10-20% of the 5970 and is nearly half the price.

Good stuff. These are the kind of conversations we need to have before purchasing.

Well,it's still a SINGLE CARD though
Yeah,it's as expensive as hell and not really affordable,but I know I'd choose it if I could.

Haha, ninja'd before my edits.

I added in my previous post:

Fastest single card? Technically.
Fastest single GPU? Disqualified, since it's Dual GPU.

Besides, it's not long until Nvidia comes out with the GTX 595, which is two 570/580s on one card.

PS: You can http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/13. The Performance/$ is much much higher on the GTX 580. Comes within 10-20% of the 5970 and is nearly half the price.

PPS: Also, the point about the GTX 595... If it comes at the steep price of $800 just like the 5970, it's also going to perform much better, since one GTX 580 almost reaches the 5970 now. So not quite double performance, but maybe 50-60% faster?

I know the 6990 may be out soon too... So the 6990 will be good, but not outperform the GTX 595. Since the 6970 doesn't quite outperform the 580 in a single GPU, single Card race.

Here are the recommended specs for a couple of upcoming 2011 games (obviously these are entirely different engines, so not sure exactly how relevant the specs would be).








I completely agree - if it is within your budget and you don't already have one, definitely get an SSD or hybrid drive to reduce the load times.

However, unless you plan to keep all your other apps on a different drive and only run windows + Skyrim + mods + savegames on the SSD, I would suggest a larger SSD or hybrid drive than 64GB. I have two 160 GB Intel SSDs in Raid0 in my laptop and 320GB is barely large enough to keep windows + all my apps + games + mods + savegames.

Also, if you can buy two SSDs within your budget and set them up in Raid0, you can roughly double the read/write speeds.