Hi Amir,

This is a little hard, as both of those GPUs are great choices. You can see from our review on the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Vapor-X OC with Boost keeps up with the GeForce GTX 670 - but it doesn't beat it.

The Radeon HD 7970 is that card, that will come close to the GTX 670 and beat it. But the Sapphire offering does come with 3GB of RAM which is good, so if you're gaming at a high resolution or enjoy throwing on lots of anti-aliasing, this will be a good boost.

Both cards are great - but the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Vapor-X OC with Boost does come short of out-performing the GTX 670, but not by much. Two of them in CrossFire X mode is still going to kick some serious ass!!!

Hi Israel,

From what you've explained there - your system is shutting down automatically when you're playing games, as well as showing a message that your processor is overheating.

You could take this as two sides - a sign to upgrade, which is something you could do to get around these issues. Secondly, your CPU could be overheating, and all you'd need to do is maybe open the case up and see if the CPU cooler (the heatsink and fan) is dirty, or dusty. You could take the cooler off of the CPU and motherboard itself, clean the CPU and HSF up and reapply some thermal paste.

This is most likely the issue - and if you didn't want to spend any money, apart from the cost of thermal paste - this should solve your problems.

Of course, you could look at this as a sign to upgrade, and grab yourself a new Core i7 CPU, motherboard and RAM. The GPU, PSU and HDDs are all good, so it would be a cheapish upgrade.

Hi Robert,

It must be a great coincidence, but we actually had this question asked by one of the guys here at TweakTown and one of our awesome fans actually replied with a perfect solution: KeyTweak.

Derek from our Facebook page recommended the software, which will allow you to rebind a key from within Windows on your Mac. It's actually a great little app, and is perfectly named... with Tweak in it, anything is possible! ;)

Hi Thomas,

Definitely. Pretty much any PCI-Express-based GPU will work on that motherboard. Heck, you could even put more than one of the GPUs on the motherboard for some CrossFireX action. The board supports quad-GPU action, so you could actually put four - yes FOUR - GPUs on that motherboard.

So you could choose any Radeon HD 7850/7870 GPU on the market, the most powerful, the most overclocked, or the best-looking, and it'll fit and work beautifully on your ASUS M5A97 motherboard.

Hi Pedro,

Not only would I vote for you - hopefully you get the joke - but let me help you with this question. If you're currently happy with the 8800 GT's performance @ 1080p with low-mid settings, then any of those video cards is going to give you an improvement.

I would skip the ASUS 8800 GTS 384MB card - as it's old, and only has 384MB of RAM. I would suggest, out of the options provided, the Gigabyte HD 6670. It will have 1GB of RAM, and is a fairly current card. It'll have no issues under Linux and will kick the ass of the card you're running now - by a long shot.

Do let us know how you go with the upgrade, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the huge performance difference.

Hi Wesley,

That's actually a great question, something we hope to cover more in the future in detail. But, yes and no - it also comes down to the rest of the components in your system such as the CPU, and storage.

If we're talking about a decent CPU, such as the Intel Core i5 chip, and let's say a mechanical HDD (not an SSD) - then it might help, but it would be single percentage points. Maybe 1-2% in load times. An SSD would mostly erase any "positive" load times or affects from faster memory for gaming.

RAM will help things that are constantly diving in and out of RAM - such as video or photo editing, rendering, etc. For gaming, there's not much of an improvement, and when there is - it's usually not enough to be instantly visible to people.

Hi Nashat,

Out of those three GPUs, the MSI GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition is definitely the way to go. If we were comparing the GTX 550 against the HD 7770 - then I would've suggested the HD 7770. But the Power Edition GPU from MSI is pretty damn good.

Because of your low resolution (1366x768) you'll find most GPUs will be bottlenecked, so any GPU in this price range should perform quite well. The MSI GTX 650 Ti Power Edition actually overclocks quite well, and performs at higher resolutions admirably.

You can read our review on MSI's GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition here.

Hi Severus,

This is really quite easy - get yourself the Google Nexus 4. I reviewed the Nexus 4 here and called it the best smartphone in the world right now, as (in my opinion) it really is. It's fast, it's gorgeous, it's feature-packed, and future-proof.

Google's Nexus-branded devices are always the first to receive the latest iterations of the Android OS - another huge benefit of owning the Nexus 4. I understand you'd like to continue owning a Sony device, continuing your legacy of owning Sony smartphones - but as you said, it's only a dual-core smartphone, where the Nexus 4 sports a quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM.

Yes, they're both the same price, but the Nexus 4 is heavily subsidized in terms of its price - it's like a $800 smartphone, for just $349.

Hi Daniel,

The 120Hz monitors are great for gaming - so first off, nice choice! I have the 27-inch model from Samsung and absolutely love it. Since your new monitor is capable of 1920x1080 and 120Hz, if you want to hit that 120 frames per second for the monitor to look silky smooth in games, you're going to need a decent GPU.

For a $650 budget - you have enough to play around with to achieve that - so I would recommend something from NVIDIA. For $529.99 from NewEgg, you could get yourself's MSI GeForce GTX 680 Twin Frozr card, which features 4GB of RAM and an awesome custom cooler.

Alternatively, since your motherboard supports SLI and your PSU is beefy enough - you could go for two-way SLI GeForce GTX 670s. NewEgg sells Galaxy-branded GeForce GTX 670s for $359ea - just over $700. This would give you plenty of power to reach 120fps in most games, and would beat the single GeForce GTX 680 in terms of performance.

The last alternative, is to grab the GTX 680 and down the track grab another one for SLI action.

Edit: Some people have wondered why I haven't recommended an AMD Radeon-based GPU - well, that is definitely an option so I'll add that in here now. NewEgg sell some of the HIS- and Sapphire-branded Radeon HD 7970s for just $379.99. You could also two-way CrossFire them up for some extreme performance.

The reason why I recommended NVIDIA here is because I've (personally) had a better run with them with 120Hz monitors. I will be running some more tests and providing some walkthroughs of this in the near future, so keep checking back to see how we go!

Hi Nicholas,

First off - I'd keep your RAM, GPU and storage. The two things you can spend the money on would be the motherboard and CPU.

I'd suggest upgrading to the Intel Core i7 3770K and a third-party HSF, something like the Corsair H80 cooler, or the H100 if you feel a bit hardcore and want to push the CPU to 5GHz with some overclocking. If you want to save some money here, you could grab the Core i5 3570K which is just $219.99 - compared to the $299.99 cost of the Core i7 3770K.

Motherboard wise, you would be best grabbing something that is SLI-capable, in case you want to throw in another EVGA GeForce GTX 670 for some awesome SLI performance. You could go with something like the ASRock Z77 Extreme 9 motherboard - which is quite feature-packed but has a great price on it.

ASRock's Z77 Extreme9 is only $299.99 on NewEgg - but is capable of overclocking that Core i7 3770K to some extreme clocks, will support your current 32GB of RAM, and sports 4-way SLI and CrossFire support - giving your GPU upgrade paths some huge legs.

I use this board in my system here at my AU-based TweakTown lab, and it is a truly awesome motherboard. I use the Core i7 3770K and Corsair H100 and have my CPU sitting at 5GHz without an issue - best of all, this combo will cost you under $1000 and will give you an absolutely huge injection of performance over your current AMD-based setup.