It’s not always easy to find out if an older PC is capable of running newer games, so in case anybody’s searching for it, I’ll throw this out there:

Skyrim runs acceptably on my Intel Pentium D 3.4GHz. The computer also has 4GB of memory and a newer graphics card, a two year old ATI Radeon HD 4850 GDDR3 512MB. Although the game got a bit of a reputation for being underoptimized, I thought it performed surprisingly well given my hardware specs.