My point was not that the game is CPU intensive, nor that upgrading his GPU is unnecessary. My point was that upgrading his GPU without upgarding his CPU is next to pointless. His CPU can't serve a modern GPU, regardless of how fast the modern GPU is (in fact, the faster the GPU, the less cost effective it would be for him to purchase without upgrading his CPU).

I'm running a single GTX 570 SuperClocked with a Core i7 870 (2.9Ghz). I consistantly get 60-80 FPS on all max settings (including shadows) in 1080p on a 120hz 27" display.

OP, please take care in upgrading your GPU. Your CPU is at the bottom of the barrel of modern CPU's. First gen i3's are faster. Your CPU WILL BOTTLE NECK modern GPU's. You CANNOT upgrade your GPU to a modern model without upgrading your CPU. You'll be wasting money on a high end GPU that your CPU can't serve at full speed.

Uhh.... 1st generation i3's out perform his CPU. If he upgrades his GPU, it will probably be immidiately bottle necked by the CPU's inability to serve the GPU data fast enough. If he upgrades one, he should probably upgrade the other.

Your GPU and CPU are both pretty old. 4GB of RAM is currently the minimum for most modern computers. 6-8GB is quickly becoming the norm. You'll have a smoother experience by making sure nothing is running in the background, and upgrading your GPU and CPU.

This, except BioWare has already stated that the security key is being developed by a 3rd party, so it has nothing to do with who BioWare has on staff.

The 5830 may have been discontinued.

If that works fine for you, awesome! The G13 might not be worth while. A lot of it comes down to play style. As a healer, I often have to have a lot of different spells available to me at any given time. Especially to avoid switching between a party layout and a solo layout. I've actually already maxed out the convenient UI space and am hoping BioWare opens the way for mods within the next month so better hotbar layouts become possible.

I do believe a and d function as q and e when using the right mouse button. I find this gives the best of both worlds as one can use the mouse to navigate and have strafing keys, or one can not use the mouse and have turning keys.

Radeons will work with Intels, nvidias will work with AMD's. There's no limits on mixing and matching GPU's and CPU's, although a slow CPU will bottle neck a fast GPU. There's really not any better nvidias in the 100-150 dollar range. Most of the competition is in the very high end, 200+ range for GPU's. Your next best bet is the Radeon 6790 for 125, or the 5830 for 110.

It takes effort, but the effort can pay off. How many hot keys do you use on your keyboard with your hand (no mouse click or mouse hand help)? Do you have to look down to use any of those? If I told you I can easily use 20 hot keys with my left hand, without looking down and without using my mouse or my mouse hand (and that's mostly limited by the UI at the moment, I could easily increase that to 30 or 40), would you think the G13 is worth it?

I've owned both (the old n52) as well, and disagree. The thing that makes the 2 worlds apart is the curvature of the n52. With the n52, it's MUCH easier to each all the buttons. I have large hands, and very long fingers, so I'm able to navigate almost all the buttons of my G13 with only a small amount of effort (and there are more buttons on the G13), but centering yourself on the n52 is MUCH easier, and there's absolutely no difficulty at all, even for someone with smaller hands, in reaching all the buttons. That being said, I'm not at all unhappy with the G13. It's really grown on me and even the joystick is fine for controlling my character. A and D keys typically turn you very fast, regardless of whether they're bound on a joystick or not, so the fact that it's hard to carefully navigate left and right with the joystick is not a complaint of mine, nor really even a fault with the G13.

Did you also change motherboards to a motherboard that supports an 1155 socket? If you want to go with a nvidia, I'd recommend a 550 Ti GTX for around 130, or a GTX 460 for around 150. There are comparable Radeons in that price range and other people have had much better success with Radeons then I have. Going nvidia is totally a personal preference of mine due to bad experiences with Radeon, and shouldn't unduly influence you.

In a big way: memory addressing. 32-bit programs and operating systems only have 4GB of memory addressing. Without using specialized protocols/architecture to reference additional memory space, 4GB is the limit, and it must be shared by all memory using prehiperals (RAM, GPU, any USB device with memory space, etc.).

This, unless you're doing multimedia editing/production. A video game today is unlikely to use more than 3GB of RAM. Throw in your OS, browser, IM, VoIP, and anti-virus and you're barely hitting 5-6GB. The rest is just gravy.