Skyrim runs on an XBOX 360. Todd Howard has said several times, that no matter the platform, the game will be pretty much the same. It has been confirmed those with a DX11 graphics card will benefit from increased speed (but the game will not use much else of the DX11 API) and the PC version will ship with higher resolution textures. I would not be surprised if those who have a gaming rig right NOW, that has an equivalent Radeon 5k series or Nvidia GTX 4 series card in it, to run the game maxed out. Porting games from consoles to PC is a joke, as most of them run flawless even with extra eye candy settings like anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering on a computer that was built within the last few years with gaming in mind.

So far, the only game I've been following that is having PC performance issues is Brink, and that is due to an unoptimized driver-set from ATi, or perhaps some bad graphics programming from Splash Damage.

Either way: The OP's computer build is obviously from a gaming-centric pre-built company, who knows they can charge an arm and a leg to those who are not capable of building a computer.

What I would recommend is to wait until a month out from release to build a computer if you feel your current system won't be able to run any of the games coming out later this year. However, I built my current system 2 years ago, and only needed to upgrade the graphics card from a Radeon 3850 to Crossfire Radeon 5850s and I have not had issues running any game ported from the consoles to the PC. I've been seriously debating selling off one of the 5850s because most of the time the second one doesn't even get much of a work-load unless I'm playing Crysis....

Anyways, I would imagine a new system with a grand total of about $750 US dollars (including OS, monitor, kb+m, etc..) would run the game just fine and last quite awhile, as I recently built a system for my younger brother on a budget of $450 and that system runs all games maxed at 1080p.

No, sorry. That will not be enough.

This, this and this few more hundred times

longest and most complicated part is software installation
putting together hardware is easy as... I don't know, but it is easy if you know how PC looks inside

101 on PC construction (order how I connect things)
motherboard
V
CPU
V
thermal grease
V
cooler
V
power supply unit
V
RAM
V
GPU
V
HDD (and SSD if present)
V
everything else left unconnected and outside case :hehe:

True. As someone said before, the "worst" part is putting the CPU and thermal grease. And there are already tons of manuals that explains it.

Now try to build a watercool system like surely I'll do...THAT's difficult

Probably just bragging... or trolling.

Would dual Geforce GTX 590 / Radeon 6990 in SLI be justified to run Skyrim http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U7e_quvkPQ? (at 7680x4320.....w00t).

I want to be a japanese in my next reincarnation. I swear

No, like I said - the $60 price point for PC games is pretty new. The vast majority of new releases over the past few years has been $59.99 for PS3/X360 & $49.99 for PC.

But the industry is starting to edge up to $60 being the standard - I first noticed some PC games doing that on Steam a couple months ago. And I see a few more among the pre-orders on Amazon.

But Portal 2, Witcher 2, Deus Ex, Duke Nukem, Fable 3, Brink, FO:NV.... all $49.99 list. (FO3 game of the year edition's same way - $29.99 for PC, 39.99 for console.)

More than 4 GB of RAM is typically unnecessary unless you plan on installing a lot of mods.

Within 2 weeks after just about any game is released you can find it for $10 to 50% less than the console version on the the open market even if they debut at the same price. This is mainly due to DRM and retailers knowing that customers will most likely not be able to resell the game. (I think there have been some recent articles where publishers expressed that reselling of console games is a LOT bigger issue for them than pirating on the PC ever was.)

Yes it will , but surely 2600 ain t worth the cash diference from the 2500.
I don t know ehre you live, so i can t comment about prices.
Building a rig ain t dificult you should learn, you have enought time till november. You will probably be able to get more bang for the bucks
Also, unless you are in need now, if skyrim is your objective, i would wait till october to buy it, since price will fall till there, as new hardwares will probably be realeased.Also more than 4gb is useless unless you got some 64 os (WINDOWS 7 64 BITS FOR EXAMPLE.)

No you re not able to run everything with that rig, especially if you have tripple monitors.
But for skyrim medium quality GFX it will be enought. I mean if the level of GFX saty the standart they are in the trailer (weak)

I

Overkill. There is no reason to get an i7, 16GB of ram is far too much unless you plan on using 8 of those for a ramdisk (which I do), and the three harddrives you picked is like an albino peacock riding a zebra riding a giraffe.
Solution: Get an i5, cut the amount of ram in half, get a solid state drive for booting and then seriously consider whether or not you need 3 terabytes. Also, find somewhere else to buy the parts. Sounds like a rip-off without even looking up the prices.


Exact same. You name it, I play it maxed settings+smooth with an HD4850 and Phenom II x2. Brink just has major issues.

We should also consider, that the prices for computer hardware differ greatly depending on what country you are in. This build also includes a monitor and blu-ray drive, which aren't free either.

I think you would probably need triple SLI to get decent frame rate, depending on the game

Yeah, he bought some candy. I put together my own computer for $1000, not as good as that, but I know it will play Skyrim fine. It plays Oblivion at a constant 60 FPS even with texture enhancing mods. If it does what you want, you should'nt need to spend your money on something you don't need. I use Photoshop a lot so I got 8gb Ram for example. 16GB is pretty much useless right now I think, unless you plan on running a lot of demanding software applications at once.

Skyrim's going to be running on the Xbox 360. You could probably get a computer for around $500 that will play Skyrim at those same settings. Although, the Xbox uses all of it's hardware for only one task. Anyway to the orignal poster; you'll be able to run Elder Scrolls VI & VII, and Fallout 4 without any problems. You could probably play all of them at once!

I have 16GB in my laptop and it doesn't really improve performance for any games AFAIK.

It does help a lot however with video editing, motion graphics, disc authoring and working in Photoshop with extremely large outdoor advertising images.

Yes, the only thing that would make the system a little better is an SSD drive instead of all the WD terabyte drives.
No moving parts make data access faster, the problem is the low capacity of these drives.
Use it strictly for gaming and your ok, storing data, such as videos and large files, you want the big (cheaper) TB drives.

I may update to 16Gb in the future. It does boost some performance with Photoshop, but not enough to justify spending more money. I usually don't need to make anything to horribly large with Photoshop anyway. And yeah, If I were doing things across all of those mediums and software applications, I would probably want to get 16gb. Especially if you were using them as a professional, using it to make money.

I had 16gb for awhile and found it to be rather... frivolous. 8gb is more than enough for the majority of users, if you need more than you know why you need it. If you don't know why you need it, you don't need more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jsHpNkDQn0

I wouldn't call "a little" to 5x more bandwitch than HDD's (if you choose a good, SandForce-powered SSD and connect it to a SATA 6G port) and a reduction of 9/1 in load times, but "******** enormous".