https://www.dropbox.com/s/8iwcv9l0sdwybt5/chat.png

..come back everyone :c

To add to the 7850 vs 660, this is worth looking at

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/783?vs=778

At stock the 660 is a bit better with worse thermals/power consumption. rQwire is right, overclocking is more in the 7850's favor, and honestly graphics card overclocking is very easy right now (just fiddle with some sliders in ccc/afterburner/whatever) so you may as well. But nvidia typically is better with driver support and has lightboost in their favor.

They're both good cards, you're not going to be disappointed either way

Having cpu overhead isn't necessarily a bad thing. Overclocking is kinda a hobby for some people, and plus it gives you a platform to move on from. This motherboard/cpu combo could last him quite a while; it's pcie-3 with no pcie-4 in sight, it can hold up to 32gb of ram, has a good amount of usb3 ports/headers, and with a good cooler and a decent overclock that cpu will be competitive with the best for a long time. A generation or two from now, when the 7850 is showing its age, he can upgrade to a new mid-to-upper end graphics card which will probably be faster and still fit the same power requirements by just unplugging the old one and dropping the new one in.

Basically, if he /really/ needed some better graphics now, I'd say you're right, get a worse cpu and spend that on a better gpu, but I think this system as is will be worth more in the long run.

Also I have an xfx card with the same cooler, they're nice. Easily one of the quietest graphics cards I've been around, even under load.

What's your "wiimote" page saying? If you have a real controller synced to your pc then you should have player one set to real wiimote. If you're using anything else then it should say emulated wiimote and you'll have to set it up.

I don't know what state it's in now but I used to have a lot of weird disconnects and stuff when I tried to get my real wiimote working a while back, I just emulated it for as many games as possible

64gb is enough if you plan on just putting the OS+tf2 on it. You just need to be smart about what you install and where it goes, and do some simple things like moving your documents/downloads/etc folders to your hard drive. If you plan on just putting tf2 on it 32gb is enough unless you have tons of maps/demos. But both of those are cutting it kinda close.

I'd really recommend, if you do buy a SSD, get one large enough for your OS and frequently used programs. Look for a decent deal on like a 120g Samsung 840 or Crucial M4.

Corsair and G.Skill are good brands, you should't have any trouble unless you get unlucky (though FZero's post is right, corsair has been getting a bit worse. They still have pretty good customer service, but having to mail stuff back sucks). The extra RAM speed won't do much for you unless you're doing something you know uses a lot of memory bandwidth (read: not video games). It doesn't hurt but don't expect it to improve your fps or anything. Either you have enough memory/bandwidth or you don't.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4503/sandy-bridge-memory-scaling-choosing-the-best-ddr3 if you care to learn more.

I don't know where you're getting the "astounding" performance difference. The ipc on intel processors is significantly higher than on AMD's processors. The i5 has a higher base clock and slightly lower turbo. And yeah, for a gaming situation they'll probably both be at max turbo unless they get too hot, but intel's ipc advantage is more than enough to make up for the 200MHz. The i5 also has hyperthreading, which isn't exactly adding cores but it certainly helps with the two core disadvantage. Also if you're worried about TF2, it's horrible at using more than two cores anyway.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/600?vs=576

Nvidia 555m == rebranded 635m (with slightly faster memory in this case)
i7 2640 is a slightly older generation than the 3230m, but it is also 2 core, hyperthreaded, same architecture, with a 200MHz clock advantage compared to the 3230m.
the AMD in that review isn't using hybrid crossfire (it's just using the 7660g, the integrated graphics part), but it really doesn't help too much. I can post some about that if you're interested, but it's pretty driver dependent. In some cases it loses performance. The 635m is as good as or better than the 7660g+7670m.

Basically that should be a decent rough comparison. The AMD in that is a bit worse than the one you're looking at and the Intel is a bit better than the one you're looking at. Obviously build specific things don't apply (battery life, screen quality, etc).

I'm not trying to say the AMD would be a bad decision, but the Intel laptop is better than you guys are giving it credit for

I know this is a bit old, but if you haven't bought it yet, make sure your motherboard can handle 8gb sticks. You might need to do 2x4GB or 4x4GB. Mine is from when the core i series came out and it can't do more than 4GB per stick. I'm only bringing this up because you mentioned it's from a few years ago.

I can't really think of much else that would be dual monitor related. If it happens on integrated too then it's not gpu scaling. I'd try disabling aero and/or playing fullscreen and see if that helps.
Also reinstalling/updating drivers would definitely be worth a shot.

One more thing, to anyone who has this, how frequent/noticeable is it? I run a multi-monitor amd setup and sometimes have weird lags, but it's pretty rare, I'm curious if it's the same thing

Yeah, that makes sense, and sucks.
But it's looking like this stuff will be here to stay for a while.

Yeah, it's looking much better. My laptop has HD3000 graphics and I'm able to get by in tf2, but it's min quality and even then not the best fps. I bet you'd be able to do pretty well with HD5000 though.

If you're worried that they'll release something better, they're always going to release something better.

But their next generation is rumored to be an almost entirely mobile launch so (assuming that's true) it'll be two years before something significant comes out for desktops (ignoring AMD, it'd be cool if they put some pressure on intel)

You probably would want to get 2x4gb of ram, not a single 8gb stick, unless you plan on getting a second one soon. You lose performance by only using one slot

I used to play on a 24 player harvest server, and it stayed above 150. 82 is a bit warm but it should't be limiting you. Idk, maybe 32 player is harder on it than I thought, I can't say I've done that in a while.

Like I said earlier, 90% cpu could be "maxed out" because the code isn't as simple/optimized as something like folding or a stress test. It has to stall to wait for memory or other tasks to finish. I'd say you are being cpu limited. But you said you have clock speed overlayed, it's not clocking down at all is it?

Just to be clear, do you typically play with vsync on? Also, you may want to try running some optimized config. Something like Chris's configs are great, and should improve things (and if you get max quality it'll look just as good as max settings).

More is better.

For real though, I'm probably going to sell them and get one or two decent ones.

It doesn't hurt you to use the second one, and it lets you have things open while playing tf, which is nice. I'd use them both if I were you

It sounds like a gpu scaling thing, especially if it's infrequent. You might try getting something like gpu-z and leaving that open on the other monitor while you're running it (on the sensors tab) and see if there's a change in clock speed or usage when it's going on. It should rule some things out, if nothing else.

Something like this, but I'd make sure that's what's happening before you mess with that

I've seen problems before that come from cards freaking out about mismatched monitors (different resolutions or refresh rates), it may have to do with that, but I don't know a good way to fix that.