First build help

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Relying on onboard video HD4250 chipset for now- thinking about buying video card after my birthday. The WEI was so bad because I forgot to install the chipset drivers... oops xD Now i'm at 4.6. Which would be better- two HD4000 series in a crossfirex situation or one HD5000?
 
Forget the HD4000 series altogether, they're outdated and don't support DX11 like the HD5000 series. The real question is between two lower end HD5000's or one high end HD5000. For instance, the HD5770 is a mid-range card with good performance by itself, but in CrossFire you'll get pretty good high end performance. I would rather recommend a single HD5870 though. The HD5870 is ATi's top notch single-GPU card and runs everything I've tried well (except Crysis on 3 monitors). It comes in around $400, so if that's too much look at the HD5850 which also has good performance. There's also the nVidia GTX460 and 470 to look into, the GTX480 is expensive though. I've read that 2 GTX460's in SLI can beat a GTX480 but with an AMD system it may not support SLI.

If you get one HD5850 or 5870 now instead of 2 lesser cards, you'll have the option to add another 5870 or 5970 (the dual-GPU version of the 5870) whenever they get cheaper or you get some extra cash.
 
You forget that: #1 I'm not a gamer, #2 I still need a monitor first (currently using 6-year-old 700x500 monitor), #3 I just want something that can do all my movie, photograph editing, and video playing (ignore the redundancy), and #4 I have an almost zero budget. That said, I am looking at something like an HD5570.
 
I have OC'd my 1055T with stock cooling to over 4 GHz without breaking 35 degrees at idle. This did however make my system unstable and made it have problems when booting windows and during benchmark tests. I brought it down to 3.8 GHz and now it's much more stable (from what I can tell- i'm too nervous to run the benchmarks again) and won't break 37 when doing internet apps and basic multitasking. It had a WEI of 7.6 at the 4.2 GHz. My question about this is, is the unstability from overloaded PSU (i've only got a 460W) or CPU? I know it's not the temps because i've been monitoring them closely.

In terms of graphics, i've done some more looking and decided that my top budget is probably close to $120 limiting me to the HD5750 at regular price and (maybe) something like the HD5770 or 5850 if I can get it on sale for cheap enough. I've seen many high-end graphics cards on shell shocker before, maybe I will get lucky? Of course, there's all this talk about the northern and souther islands GPU's, so i have to ask: 1) when will they be out, 2) how much are they going to cost, and 3) will it be worth whatever extra cost there is to get a 6000 or 7000 series GPU? Of course, the prices of the 5000 series will fall when they come out, so that has to be considered.
I must remind myself that there's no point of getting a better graphics card until I get a better monitor as my onboard hd 4250 is already putting out much more than my 6-year old monitor can display, so it'll take me quite a while to save up for all of these things. I can always get a graphics card and hope that I get a monitor for christmas.
 
Via BIOS setup? I'm nervous about messing around with BIOS in case I screw something up. The only time I had to touch BIOS was when I fixed the RAM frequency. I've been doing all of my overclocking via the software included with the motherboard (TurboV Evo). It automatically adjusts the CPU voltage to match the frequency. The highest stable setting is 249 MHz with 1.275 CPU voltage and at core multiplier 14.0. It was unstable at the same frequency and voltage but core multiplier at 16.0.

Any thoughts on the video?
 
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