I purchased an ASUS VG236H in December 2011, and I have enjoyed it ever since the first minute I powered it on, adjusted my refresh rate and moved my mouse cursor around in awe of how smoothly it moved across the screen. Even if you can't maintain 120 FPS in games, the 1-2ms gray to gray response time of the panels is much nicer than the average 5ms panels you get in monitors around the $100 mark. Screen tearing is also much less noticeable if you play without VSYNC enabled and your frame rate exceeds the refresh rate from what I've seen.

If your computer is horrendous though, you're probably better off upgrading it first. A $300 monitor won't improve a $300 PC you got at Walmart 5 years ago.

NVIDIA Display Driver Feedback Survey: http://surveys.nvidia.com/index.jsp?pi=6e7ea6bb4a02641fa8f07694a40f8ac6

I heard from someone on here that the GeForce 320.00 BETA driver supposedly resolved the texture flickering problem. Worth a try. http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/61261

Does your card have two stacked DVI outputs? If so, one is single link and the other is dual link. The one closest to the PCB (in-line with the HDMI/DP outputs) should be the dual link port.

I use reds which work decently for gaming, but as others stated it's easier to mistype stuff with them. They are better than rubber membrane dome keyboards for sure (my old G15 v2 I am typing on at work is annoying me with its goofy tactile feedback).

He owns an HD 7990.

The active adapters might solve your issue (we'll see). Eyefinity can be weird due to how the 6 TDMS links are split up over the display outputs. The single dual link DVI port uses two links while everything else uses one. You pretty much have to use at least one DP connection which is of course where your adapters come into play.

I'd highly recommend mATX as a compromise between the cute little ITX systems and your average ATX system.

Here's a quick and dirty list of parts that would probably get you on target with your budget (of course they can be reconfigured later on):

Case ($40): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811553011

Board ($110, I own one with an overclocked 3770K): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157306

Core i5 3570k - $220
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116504

PSU ($70): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139050&Tpk=CX%20500M&IsVirtualParent=1

VGA ($120): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202023

RAM ($36): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231427

HDD ($75): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148840

ASUS DVD-RW Drive - $20
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827135204

Total: $690 w/o shipping (some things can be cut down even further)

I figured you would enjoy that HD 7770 (640 stream processors @ 1100MHz) versus the HD 7750 (512 stream processors @ 800MHz) for the same price.

How much money do you need to save? Going with an ITX platform is killing you cost-wise as you can get a half decent ATX/mATX case for $40-50 and the motherboards are cheaper as well. Something can probably be figured out given a target budget. :)

A couple things...

Getting a 3570K and pairing it with an H77 board is useless, as H77 does not support overclocking. A better Z77 ITX board for $10 more would be: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128568

You can do better with the power supply. This one, despite being an Antec, has generic casing and is only certified for 80% maximum efficiency. consider a similar Corsair unit with modular cabling to cut down on the cables and 80+ Bronze (85% efficiency) for the same price: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139050&Tpk=CX%20500M&IsVirtualParent=1

The Lian-Li case accepts dual-slot video cards, so don't be afraid to get a dual-slot HD 7770 which should offer a little more performance and run more quietly: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202023

Each processor has their caveats. Intel CPUs are expensive, but they are power efficient, have awesome single threaded performance and you don't need a board with a crazy VRM section just to get a decent overclock without killing the board. AMD FX CPUs are cheaper, but they are designed more for multi-threaded workloads more than anything. Single-threaded performance is relatively poor, they are power hungry and Windows 7 cannot schedule threads efficiently on them due to the shared module architecture (Windows 8 does a little better, though). I personally prefer Intel i7 CPUs as they are efficient and they work very well with my distributed computing hobby. I'm more than willing to pay the extra upfront cost and save the money in electricity and air conditioning (Florida) to keep quite a few computers going 24/7 under full load.

You need to open your case and get the information off of the label on the PSU. It will tell us your motherboard, though.

On tech forums, a reference cooler 7970 goes for around $300 used, but that's with the annoying stock cooler. Honestly a 7950 is only about 3-6% slower yet great cards go for $300 new, such as these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125414

The Radeon HD 5770, while still enough for TF2, is becoming older and it was only a mid-high range card when was released 3 years ago. An HD 7850/7870 or even a 7950 would be preferred on the AMD side, or GTX 660 Ti/GTX 670 for NVIDIA. Your CPU will probably hinder some of these cards to an extent in some games, but a little overclocking (assuming your board has a decent voltage regulation section and a heatsink on the MOSFETs) can alleviate that a bit. Any chance you could get the make and model of your motherboard?

Also, a *good* 500w PSU is plenty for a single card setup. We really need to know who made your PSU and what model it is. The CPU and motherboard can be upgraded later at your choosing, along with the RAM.

If you want to keep having 6 cores/12 threads but want to ditch the LGA 1366 platform, the only comparable platform out right now is an LGA 2011 board with an i7-3930K. LGA 1155 only supports 4 core/8 thread processors maximum with dual channel RAM. The Haswell LGA 1150 4th generation "i series" mainstream platform will be unveiled soon along with the 3rd generation Ivy Bridge-E extreme processors for LGA 2011/X79.

I'd suggest you hang onto your gear for a little while until new processors come out shortly. It's a little late to pick up an Intel 3xxx chip and IMO your processor is still quite decent despite lacking the newest instruction sets.

Could be a failing HDD (they can often die after a year or two of use). Download and run HDTune, and check your SMART health status. There will be yellow or red bars highlighting some attributes if there is an issue. http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtunepro_550_trial.exe

Did you use the "Backup and Restore Games" function of Steam? It is pretty horrible and Steam just ends up not using your backup anyway in favor of downloading it off the internet. It's easier to copy the steamapps folder (or at least the TF2 part of it) from machine to machine and have Steam rediscover all the games in my opinion.