SH5 Performance/CTDs

[0rpheus]

Ahoy subsim captains!

Wow, where to start... Made the move to 5 from SH4. Initial thoughts were:

'Wow. Looks gorgeous. Hang on, framerate.. Shadows medium, AA lower, particles lower... Still no good. 50 fps and still stuttering?! Ah, antilag.. that'll do it... Framelimit 35, render ahead 3.. perfect, runs like a dream.'

Played tutorial, started thinking about mods. Game updated to latest (I assume) via the auto updater, disc install. Current mod soup as follows:

Magnum Opus_0_0_1
MO v0_0_1
MO Patch 2
Shadow Improvement ModLR
Arclight MRP
Critical Hits 1.1 Torpedos
Reduced Mission Tonnage v02

Also antilag & SH5 patcher (hydrophone fix only so far).

Got these set up, very happy, started campaign and off I sail to the Coastal Waters of Britain...

boom -CTD. Seems to happen quite a lot - when approaching ships, sometimes just at random, even once when I tried to end patrol at Kiel. I'm now saving it as often as possible so I can restart close to the crash point, but is this really the way SH5 runs? Most of you chaps seem to have much longer mod lists than me, do you guys get CTDs quite a lot too?

Framerate is pretty poor in places even with just these mods, and with the LR shadow improvement - Kiel's fine, but passing through a convoy at night (with explosions, hehe) really brought the stutter back.

My rig is as follows:

Core i5 @ 3.6g o/c
4Gig DDR3 @ 1333 Mhz
ATI 5770 x2 (only single GPU used so far, not tried Xfire)
Win 7 64

Bit stunned that my pc would even have trouble with a 2009 game, runs Arma2 fine and many other high-power games with no difficulty at all. I've tried the Large Address Aware software fix from SH4 and that seemed to reduce CTDs, but I can't be certain as what will crash one minute (say approaching a ship), will, upon reload of the save be fine so it could just be a placebo.

It makes no sense! I knew coming from SH4 that I'd have to mod 5 to get it truly playable, but I've now spent 3 days straight modding it and still CTD/low performance. I've tried adding OHII (with 50% harbour fix & 20% mines fix) to the existing list and that made it even worse in terms of both frames and CTD, even dropping to OHII Lite (which was way better for framerate) still CTDs so I dropped back to the list above... still CTDs. Starting to wonder if the CTDs aren't related to the mods at all - and I really would like to use both OM & OHII!

I know my way around JSGME etc and I'm sure there must be captains out there with similar systems that have managed to get their game playable? Can anyone help... or should I shelve it and go back to SH4?

Thanks to anyone who reads/replies, and sorry for what must be the millionth post on this topic!