Need Some Hardeware Advice

[sleighrX]

My pc blew up (literally) awhile ago, thanks to an unfortunate combination of a well-earned three week vacation, and a rather industrious spider who made my tower her nesting place while I was away.  Coming home, first thing I do is turn on my desktop to catch up on my email and... FOOM! The entire pc is flash-burned to slag.

 

I can now finally buy a new pc, however I'm a bit stymied on what to get.  I want to get back to playing and modding Oblivion, and I also want to play Skyrim, Fallout 3, 4, and NV.

 

Can anyone give me some advice on what modern hardware to avoid (vid cards, cpu, etc.) and what works well with these games?  This is a brand new fully up-to-date system I'm getting.  Oh, and what's the performance like with Oblivion and the following OS's? Would it be better to stick with Win 7?  Or go with 8.1 or 10?

 

I haven't been able to update in a long time, so I'm way out of touch.  I appreciate any help before I go and slap down a grand or more, then load up Oblivion and find it doesn't work!

 

[gregathit]

Oblivion won't care what OS you play on.  It won't really care much about your video card either.  CPU - multiple cores........yea, won't use em.  Don't skimp on the CPU speed is the only real thing you need to worry about.  Oblivion is CPU bottlenecked to a large degree, so even huge amounts of ram won't gain you much.

 

Best to look at the fallout 4 spec's and work off of that.  Fallout 3 and FNV will work fine with that.  Skyrim, will it is bottlenecked right now with Windows 8 and up, but with the 64 bit version coming out soon, that will cease to be much of an issue.  I'm playing skyrim with windows 10, and as long as you don't install 4k textures, you're fine.

 

Cheers,

Greg

[xartom]

OS is preference afaik (not sure how running this under wine in linux would work tho.) Anyway, only thing I think matters is that OS is 64bit so those 4gb+ patches do their job. 

 

Nvidia gfx cards seem to hate me/and/or the games I play, but ymmv. There's a fog fix for Oblivion and probably other games, never had issues with ATI I must say.

 

Have over 4gb of ram somewhere and a gfx card with at least 1gb ram (if you want pretty textures). Heard good things about SSD for harddrive but never had an issue with loading on an older drive.

 

You can run a decent modblivion on equipment that was top end in 2006 and it's probably near the best performance you can get anyway minus prettypretty gfx style mods.

[sleighrX]

What about AMD vid cards?  The store I'm buying from has a deal with the supplier for those, so I can get one for a lot cheaper than other types.  Plus what's a good fast CPU, gamewise, in your own opinion?

 

 

Sorry for the long delay b/t posts, but I have to use a 'Net cafe for now, and getting a slot is hard, since I live near 3 high schools and a college who all get out an hour before I get off work.

[xartom]

Same company as ATI, should be good, only thing I've personally had issues with is Nvidia, but everyone is different.

 

Gaming in general I think gpu is going to be a bigger block in around-the-corner modded games (and perhaps superprettyomg Oblivion 4k dds, but no where near it) than cpu.

4790k /4690k good if you want a pricier (but not like 2k type of pricey) upgrade with some future proofing.

 

Clockspeed on a single core is king since Oblivion doesn't know what multithreads are, and modern games are just starting to really use it. You could probably get away with a later measly two core Pentium D processor overclocked to 4.something, assuming you had good gpu and 4gb+ ram. On that thing you could even play modded Skyrim. Not insanely modded, but still good.

 

Limit is your budget, I went the multicore option here, since I haven't seen clockspeeds get much faster outside an engineering lab in many years, and I don't forsee them getting faster for a very long time (dust is deadly).

[Sladen2019]

Windows 7 64 Bit is the overall best way to go for Bethesda games.  You dont get the forced updates, nor the forced limit of vram dx9 games can use that Windows 10 users get. If your budget permits, avoid AMD. AMD parts are cheaper and generally offer seemingly great specs, but they tend to run hotter and use more watts and have poorer driver support. Intel, Nvidia, ASUS are ideal if you can afford.  If you decide to go with Windows 7. A good way to get it uptodate fast is to use a program called WSUS Offline. 

 http://download.wsusoffline.net/