no2spam2

Unless an extra 10-30 ms is going to make/break your FPS experience, I would go with an Intel card myself. Along the same lines, if 30 ms ping difference is significant enough for you - you should be using ethernet or powerline networking instead. WiFi will always have burs-ty ping.

AMD really does make it difficult with the inconsistency of their software releases. I have been an AMD fan for a long time with GPUs, due to their performance per dollar ration - but the latest nVIDIA packages (hardware/software) are just hard to argue with. ShadowPlay is awesome, the GPUs run cooler, nVIDIA Shield will probably be a lot more usable in the next couple of hardware revisions and their updates/fixes/SLI profiles are constantly getting released. AMD's updates are completely sporadic and their Crossfire profiles get updated very infrequently. I am going with an nVIDIA card for my upgrade for sure - my HD 6970 is getting dated.

This is generally the end result. RAID 0 makes very little sense for every day desktop performance. Most people would not notice the difference. Unless you are doing a lot of sequential data writing really fast (video editing, etc) - I would argue it is a waste of money. Putting the funds towards a higher tier video card or a better monitor makes more sense imho.

You haven't mentioned which OS version you have, but you could run Windows XP mode under Windows 7 Pro and get around it that way. If you can find an old copy of Windows XP, you can also try installing it under VirtualBox (free) or VMWare Workstation: VMware Workstation: Run Multiple OS, Linux, Windows 8 & More; | United States I know VMWare supports graphics acceleration for sure.

I have the Dell and compared to other IPS monitors it actually has fairly low input lag. There are a lot of detailed tests here: Dell U2312HM Review Some might not want to lose 1" of screen real estate, but with a little bit of tweaking + excellent stand, I actually think it is a better value over the ASUS. There are a couple of different production revisions, so they might not all perform exactly the same. The one I have seems very well off.

I would also consider the Thermaltake Massive 23 LX if you could benefit from having static USB ports on the desk: Amazon.com: Thermaltake Massive23 LX Laptop Notebook Cooler Oversized 230mm Blue LED Fan USB CLN0015: Computers & Accessories For keyboard/desktop setup the buil-in USB hub is a nice touch.

I have a MyDigital BP4 240 GB in my Y400 and it is not having any issues for 6+ months now. I did a clean install of Windows 8 on it, instead of cloning the mechanical drive.

Thank you for coming back and updating the post. A lot of threads go into the nether without ever being resolved.