Hello

Right, I've heard loads of people are upgrading their PC's for when Skyrim comes out, so I thought I would jump on the bandwagon and do the same! Except, I had people custom build my computer for me, as I am quite new to PC gaming and have never actually bought a graphics card or anything else myself before and have no idea how to install one (Don't worry I know a couple of people that know how).

Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone had any suggestions on what to upgrade and how? I'm thinking about the graphics card mainly, but I'm not sure if I can upgrade other things, anyway here is my system info;

Windows 7 Home Premium
Processor: AMD Athlon™ II X2 245 Processor 2.90 GHz
Installed Memory (RAM): 4.00GB
System Type: 64-bit Operating System
Graphics Card@ ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series

That'll run Skyrim fine.

Thanks
I hoped it would, but like I said I have no idea about computers and my mates a salesman so he'd obviously try and sell me the most expensive thing he had in stock even if I didn't need it!

The CPU is......urffff, "nice"...

But I'd consider buying a nice Geforce GTX 570/Radeon 6xxx or so for 200 bucks by October to ensure you can run it. A low-end ATi 4xxx just won't be enough.

your computer is nice, u can handle it.

Thumb of rule. Never upgrade before the game is released.

I'm half wondering if I've shot myself in the foot by buying a 6970 right now: a lot could happen between now and November. Then again, there is a rash of games coming out this spring and I "need" DirectX 11, so it's not like I could really put it off either. I wish my games PC would just magically upgrade itself. For free.

A 6970 will do just fine I'm sure. I have a 5970 and every game is still running fine and I've even set my anti-aliasing to 12x or 24x (that is Edge-detect 4x or 8x).

As for upgrading a computer to run skyrim, I'm not sure it's really needed unless they put in all the heavy DX11 goodies. Since the consoles themselves haven't been upgraded, if your computer ran Oblivion before, it should run Skyrim, you'll likely just have to turn of the PC specific enhancements like DX11 and high-res textures

As for the OP, you might want to upgrade your Processor to an X4 and RAM to 8GB. A 64-bit Windows 7 OS will roughly load close to 2GB of RAM since 64-bit is meant for dealing with larger data sets. Increasing your RAM size will also show its advantage should the game become LAA (Large Address Aware) and you fill it with a ton of community mods.