Recommended number of mods for Skyrim on my PC

[FromanSK]

I have a decent gaming laptop. It's served it's purpose and more thus far with nearly 2,000 hours of gaming. My most played game is Skyrim, and I have a problem with it. I always mod the game as much as I possibly can. When I create a new character and start a playthrough, it's generally quite stable even with all the mods. I can play the game with few stutters and little lag. As I continue playing, however, the game becomes more unplayable. The size of my save files begins to rapidly increase. Eventually, and usually seemingly out of nowhere, the game begins to stutter, freeze and lag every few seconds (especially in combat), and I have to start over.

Basically, I'm here for advice about just how much I should mod my game. Typically I don't run too many "massive" mods. I always use SkyRe, SMIM, usually Climates of Tamriel and some other script-heavy mods (i.e. Frostfall). ENBs are, of course, out of the question. I do use loads of additional mods that are significantly smaller. The point is that everything runs fine on a clean save but becomes progressively worse as time goes on.

To give you an idea of how many mods I run, it is usually around 50, maybe 60. It varies.

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz
Graphics: GeForce GT 630M
4GB RAM
Windows 7 64 Bit

Like I said, it's not great, but it serves it's purpose.

tl;dr Please look at my specs and suggest a benchmark number of mods I should run in order to have a long lasting playthrough that doesn't succumb to save game bloat. Other advice in general is also welcome.

 

[FinalDrive]

The 4GB ram is going to be the biggest factor in performance degrading over time. During a play session it fills that and has to swap data from RAM to the page file. If you are running larger textures this is more noticable.

The issue with savegame "bloat" is that it has to keep track of everything you have done, meet, looted etc... so as you progress it will get progressively larger, I am not aware of any way to prevent that from happening.

I have around 70 mods running without issue other than the occasional dip in FPS when it loads a new area, but running from a SSD mitigates most of that. For load order you might want to capture a list of the mods you have installed/running and ask on the nexus forums, but if the game isn't outright crashing I suspect they are in an acceptable order alreasy.