Build the perfect Skyrim PC for $850

It’s to be expected with the current technology available to PC gaming enthusiasts that playing Skyrim on a custom rig is the way to get the best overall play experience. The graphics look better, the world loads faster, and the modding community is vibrant and actively making the game better. Console gamers can’t enjoy the same level of interaction, but they do have a leg up in the fact that playing the game on the 360 or PS3 has a fixed cost. If you’re using an older rig, then you have to upgrade your system to be able to handle the latest titles — or, alternatively, simply start from scratch and build something new. This is not necessarily a bad thing since upgrading is almost always fun and useful, but with a recession going on it’s smart to keep costs low. So what is the “sweet spot” to upgrade your system to give it enough power while still remaining economical?

If money is not an issue for you, more power to you. Run out and buy yourself the most memory you can fit in your machine, two GeForce GTX 580 cards and a Core i7-2600K. Those upgrades will cost you around $2,000. For many, that is more than they spent on their whole rig and not a good option — and your significant other might have a thing or two to say about spending that much to play a video game. The good news is that there is no need to purchase the cream of the crop components to play Skyrim at the highest settings. The idea is to do some research and find the hardware that will allow your system to render at about 50 frames per second, giving you smooth gameplay in all but the most taxing situations.

There is an excellent article on Kotaku that lists out the benchmarks of the various video cards and processors at different resolutions. With 1900×1200 being a good median to work from, we find some good options for a lower cost upgrade.

A good memory choice is the 16GB kit from Corsair. At $89.99, it equals out to about $5.25 per GB, which is a great deal. This should give you plenty of memory for your system to work with. With video cards, you have a couple of choices. If you are partial to ATI based cards, there are a few options depending on what you want to spend. In the $230 price range, the Radeon HD 6950 renders Skyrim at 54 FPS, which is very close to the higher end cards tested. For about a $80 less, you could pick up a HD 6850 and still be pegged right at 50 FPS.

On the Nvidia side the options are a bit more limited. Clocking in at 51 FPS there is the GeForce GTX 560 Ti for $249. At almost the same price point Nvidia offers the GTX 470. Both cards are comparable in FPS, and while a bit pricier than their ATI counterparts, get really good ratings across the board. Really it depends on your individual build to determine which card is right for you.

As far as a processor upgrade, you can get great performance with an Intel Core i5-750 at 2.66 GH , which costs $200. AMD CPUs did not fare as well with Skyrim; the only offering that gets above 50 FPS is the Phenom II X4. It’s a bit cheaper than the Core i5, so it may be an option for you.

If you were to need all of the upgrades listed above, the total bill would be around $530. Much cheaper than the top-of-the-line components, but still a good chunk of change. If you were to build an entirely new computer from scratch, just to play Skyrim at max settings, you’d be looking at around $850 — $150 for the motherboard, $70 for the PSU, $50 for the case, and $50 for an optical drive, assuming you use your old monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

Of course, with the Black Friday deals going on, you could get a PS3 and an Xbox 360 and a ton of games, and not have to worry about upgrades. Of course, there’s not much fun in that, is there?

Build the perfect Skyrim PC for $850