I modded NV quite heavily when I first played it, mainly because the creaky engine looks horrid in places, so if you have a good pc, use the best voted texture and environmental mods. In the first play-through. DOF complete was a good one, and sotred out the okay useage of it in the game.

But, an essential mod is this: http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34783

Mods the running speed to be little/lot faster depending on your choice. I never cared for the default running speed, because it is dire slow. This mod will solve much of that frustration you'll probably encounter with that weak point.

There are a lot of great graphical enhancements to New Vegas I use like Project Reality, NMC's, Vurts, PocoBueno, Textures over Time and the Directors Chair combo but I don't recommend them for anyone right off the bat simply because you do need a good PC as they can quickly make an average one unplayable. With any graphic mods YMMV.

Would something like a GTX 460 1GB suffice though? Not sure if OP has a card like that. My card ATI 5850, manages to hold up nicely with enhanced shades (normal version, I think), director's chair and hi res texture mods. But saying that, I play at 1366x768 so the punch from 1080P and above isn't felt.

Yeah the resolution is the problem there. My card is a 6850 and I don't run with enhanced shaders as there is a drop at 1920x1080 which I play at. I do use all the mods I mentioned though as they are more memory intensive than CPU and the 4GB patch should cover that along with the cards 1GB memory. NMC High textures would be pushing it though I think.

Given how often New Vegas crashes, you will need CASM.

Grab the script extender and dump it in steamapps\common\fallout new vegas. Double click the .exe to launch Fallout. After launching it once, Script Extender will also run when you run New Vegas from Steam.

Now grab CASM, load it as a datafile as you would normally. Hold F4 whilst in game to modify how often you want it to save. I currently have it set to save every 5 minutes, since New Vegas pretty much crashes every 6 minutes.

Bumping this. Started playing New Vegas again with various mods, after completing Fallout 1 for the third time. Most of the mods I'm using are lore-friendly (IMO), though WMX and Craft Pack take some extra liberties. Still, I haven't got around to trying those two extensively, so whether or not they unbalance the game, I can't say for sure. I'll have to assume they don't, judging from the documentation. Much kudos to the authors of these mods: I'm still looking for good face texture mods though, to make faces look less like plastic surgeries gone wrong. I wanted to try Fallout New Vegas Redesigned, but I was afraid of conflicts with Mission Mojave, so I didn't. The Detailed Normals mod was also taken down from Nexusmods. Any other recommendations?