Hi, sorry - I should update my sig. The motherboard is this:
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3760
The rest of my spec is mostly in the first post (sorry for so many messages).
I'm playing a game at the moment and it seems ok (it's lasted longer than it did before but we'll see).
I didn't think vtt should affect the display either since it's a memory setting, seems strange.
However, (here comes my excuse which I need to rehearse ready for explaining to the OH)... I spend nearly all day every day on my PC at University or at home programming, so I really get frustrated when my PC starts failing. I need it to be reliable. My i7 920 has lasted me since the 920 was first released (2008/9 I think) and I did upgrade from an X58m to the G1 sniper but my motherboard has lasted me a fair while too. I've been upgrading parts around the CPU and motherboard (SSD, memory, graphics cards, PSU, even the case) without really spending much on the CPU or motherboard - mainly because I know that they need doing together and the price + effort of it.
I'm starting to think I should just spend a little money and upgrade them to try to avoid these problems. I'll admit I am slightly looking for an excuse to upgrade (and, as my OH will say I don't have money to burn), but if it is likely to fix all these problems and improve performance then it might be worth it. Since I haven't really looked into hardware much at all, roughly how much better are current low end i7s / high end i5s than the 920 (2.6Ghz)? Would I actually see much difference? If it's the case that I would, and I can upgrade the motherboard and PSU for around £300, then I think it might be something to think about.
I seem to have been firefighting a lot recently with my setup and there are some other motherboard problems (sound crackling & no linux drivers for the networking and no new updates since 2011 for drivers etc which may be because of stopping support - they don't even officially have windows 8 drivers).
I'm looking at this
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html and my 920 is scoring 5,006, although I don't know what that means in real world usage, it does look like recent i5s are a lot better.