Best Setup guide for Skyrim Modding

[Corsayr]

Okay 

 

Boring back story stuff not needed to know for answering the question

 

Yesterday I awoke to an unrecoverable windows registry error (related to my involvement in the Window Beta testing project) and I as a result have had to do a total system restore from disk. I am now back to a clean install of windows 7 pro

 

 

I figure since  I am starting from scratch on everything might as well do it right from the start.

 

The Question: What is the best step by step guild to installing and fine tuning Skyrim for max performance in preparation for some heavy lifting in the form of a highly modded build.

 

System information if that helps:

 

 

Window 7 Pro 64

AMD FX-8350 eight-core Processor 4.01 Ghz

Evga NVidia GeForce GTX 980 4g (currently in single mode but I have 2 and could put do SLI but not sure if it even helps)

32768MB Ram

55in curved screen 4k monitor (Would love to be able to run Skyrim 4k but probably not realistic, targeting 2k)

 

 

 

 

Personal preferences:

I like NMM I know most of you are big fans of MO, and i am willing to change but would like too know what the benefit of doing so actually is.

 

I like LOOT over BOSS (BOSS was mean to me once and I hold grudges for a very long time  )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

/discuss 

[Stiffon]

Okay 

 

 (BOSS was mean to me once and I hold grudges for a very long time  )

/discuss 

 

This just made me lol

 

On a serious note, I often use STEP for MO as a good start point - http://forum.step-project.com/forum/62-mod-organizer-support/

I have some other links I'll see if I can find.  Lots of info on here too for setting up.

 

I prefer MO - takes a little bit of learning up front, but is waaaay easier in the long run and less user error prone with overwrites.

[Sharkness Monster]

Your PC should be able to handle it fine. Got a decent rig

 

I remember getting the needed mods first, like FNIS, ECE, ect...

Chargen stuff, racemenu and Actor skeletons.

Then more cosmetic mods like ENB's, sexlab, armor/weapons n' stuff.

 

After every few mods I added, I ran the game to make SURE it didn't CTD.

 

I'm running an i7 with a GTX 1070 so I never get FPS drop of any kind though.

[allsunday]

SLI really does help with Skyrim giving an avg of 15-20 fps.  There's only one unsolved problem with Bethesda's outdated engine when using SLI though:  water ripples.  You'll see.  Not a big deal to me, water ripples in Skyrim are negligible no matter how many mods are used.

[Sarge Misfit]

BOSS has been supplanted by LOOT and is no longer being worked on, as far as I know, so you've no worries there.

I'm old school and prefer manually installing mods. I use MO for the ability to sort by flags which makes it super easy to find missing masters.

 

There's quite a few guides out there on installing mods, the one I've seen talked about and recommended the most is S.T.E.P.

[Corsayr]

BOSS has been supplanted by LOOT and is no longer being worked on, as far as I know, so you've no worries there.

I'm old school and prefer manually installing mods. I use MO for the ability to sort by flags which makes it super easy to find missing masters.

 

There's quite a few guides out there on installing mods, the one I've seen talked about and recommended the most is S.T.E.P.

 

I have seen a lot of the guides, and they all seem to be pretty similar, but there are differences. 

 

I know a lot of people talk about STEP, but it always kind of seemed like it was more geared toward fixing vanilla skyrim. Things like the STEP packs fix vanilla textures and things that I'm just gonna overwrite with texture mods anyway (or so I imagine... am I wrong about that?)

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/74427/? Stability Performance Optimization ENB configuration - by Sthaagg is the one I "half ass" used prior to my windows melt down. I say "half ass" cuz I did some of the steps after I had already been playing a heavy modded skyrim for months and there had been other things I had did before and it was all kind of a patch work of changes. Basically a mess but mostly stable.

 

but now that I am looking at a fresh start I'm thinking. Is this the most comprehensive? Is everything in this the right way to go about it? So I thought I'd ask the community.  

[Sarge Misfit]

Yeah, I've never followed the STEP guide.

 

Have you looked through the LL forums for threads about Must Have Mods?