Well after a month and a half of Intel's Haswell CPU hitting the streets, I finally splurged on an i7 4770k to replace my 4 year old Phenom II. The difference is phenominal. It really is. My framerates in TF2 alone are far better. The lowest I've seen was ~70 FPS on a 32 man 2fort server which certainly beats ~40 or at least it would. See a long time ago when I bought my Phenom II, microsoft had a deal on windows 7 for college students where you could buy Windows 7 Pro for $30. It was great, problem is, the backup disc has no product key and I am no longer enrolled (hoping to change that very soon but I digress).

From what I've read in the microsoft support center or whatever it is, all signs point to "sucks for you, pay up." Now currently I'm running Linux Mint 15 with KDE for teh frameratez. But there's an issue. Last year I made the error of purchasing an MSi Raedon 7870. Under windows, its fine for the most part. Under Linux, performance is less than stellar because well AMD and driver don't quite go hand in hand. In fact I have to turn down some settings in order to get comparable framerates to windows (game running natively, not in WINE).

So I've come to a bit of a conundrum. Do I shell out for another Windows 7 key, "upgrade" to Windows 8 as its about the same price, stay with Linux Mint, deal with it and hope things get better or get an nvidia graphics card and hope it resolves the issue?