Show me your quantitative measurements for everything you tried to dispute. 

I am not encouraging him to do much with his Gateway ad it wouldnt be cost effective.  Changing GPU is the best way, and getting older GPU at a substantial discount is a great way.  The GPU clockspeed on the labels do not reveal true performance.  There are countless websites and publications dedicated to benchmarking GPU performance for different types of games.  Cheaper top of line GPU on clearance to make room for new GPU cut on new dye is very economical.  

Your opinion of whether crossfire or SLi work is based on what?  Not everyone has the budget or want to spend over $250 in this case to get a gpu.  Some time down the road, he just might wishhe bought a higher end card, without paying top dollars forone, the same GPU which he has had for a while could be mated with a now cheaper twin.  The boost is noticeable, measurable, is it as good as one gpu? No, but it's an option again with quantifiable results.

Is your knowledge coming from experience or are you just feeling superior because you read it somewhere?  How do you even know what he would want in the future?  PC gaming often leads down that forever hardware upgrade cycle.  Your dismissing my experience hardly is surprising given the "quality" of some of the posters here.  I took the time to help him.  You took a cheap shot at me, but how does that help anyone here? And you don't even have facts to support your dispute!

Write down what you do for a living and let's see how qualified you compared with pros and testers at Tom's Hardware.  And for your lack of knowledge on hardware, you can have the same gpu, cpu, ram, harddrive and STILL have vastly different results.  Gateway motherboard has a lower bandwidth. Some motherboards support Crossfire or SLi but the bus isnt wired with enough bandwidth.  And let me tell you why PC gamers (not Zynga gamers) pursue upgrades and why the small difference matters so much:

1. In FPS, if your FPS is not enough, you are gping to die without "seeing" why.

2. In MMOs, if your party spend days organizing, and hours getting to the boss at the end of an instanced dungeon, your freezing, skipped frame, or oops I didnt see here was aggro there, could wreck the experience fo everybody.

I did not make an assumption of what types of games he wishes or would eventually find fun an interesting.  What makes you even remotely qualified to say He wants to play PC games, everything is fine? Did you NOT read that he said if he liked the experience he would try to build a system NEXT? Your lack of knowledge and even worse appreciation of people's time is not a good habit to have.  I hope you are successful in real life already, cuz I'm not so sure your attitude will take you very far.

Radeon 7750 (I had 2) is a very low power drawing card....very low.  If you are considering upgrading, building your own rig, I highly suggest a Kill A Watt meter to test the max power draw by running varius cpu and gpu intensive tests (many available for free).  It is not very powerful but a great value. I was able to run TWO 7750 overclocked, SSD plus the original 1Tb harddrive, overclocked CPU, and the original PSU did just fine.  

But if your budget is $250, and this thing is only $109, please keep in mind that even if you crossfire 2, the performance would be less than the gpu that costs twice the money today.  So buying the best performance for your budget is the best bet, as that gpu stands half a chance to be brought over to your next rig crossfired or traded in.  It's a never ending cycle, and it almost never pays at the end.  You will get almost there performance when you build your own system.  Trying to squeeze more performance via overclocking etc will introduce overheating problems (thus fan upgrades, water cooled systems etc).  I have first hand experience with an i7 Gateway just like yours and eventually had to get new motherboard, ddrm, ssd, etc. It was fun as heck.  And don't let me get into "mechanical" keyboards, once you switch to that you would never turn back.

Deleted.  

Sorry about the circus sideshow.

On the solid state drives, don't listen to his garbage. Just try it or even youtube some footage of side by side comparisons. SSDs really shorten the time it takes from boot up to gamescreen. Also for games with "loading screens" from area to area too, those come up much faster. SSDs are definitely worth the money.

And in case my message got lost, one GPU is always better than two lesser GPUs run in tandem. It's an option some people take but if you are going spend $250, it's better on one gpu then two for $120 each. Benchmarks consistently show crossfired gpus perform better than just one, but the improvement is more 30%ish. But if you do desire more performance yet simply refuse to spend $500 for a good gpu, do try crossfire. The small glitches he refers to are tolerable considering that without another gpu, you most likely will have to turn off AA or some graphical effects. For some games, the breathtaking scenes are the reason you are playing!

My personal experience with upgrading Gateway system similar to yours (but higher end), is I ended spending way more than I would have, had I just left Gateway alone. Each component added, starting with the GPU upgrade improved benchmarking results, but not to a point the costs were justifiable.

On Component costs, I guess since he lives in England where everything is pricier, he doesnt know how we get everything shipped here by the mother load and things frequently go on sale. If you live near a Micro Center, or Fry's they always have stuff on sale, especially Microcenter. Tigerdirect and Newegg are also good places online. Amazon is awesome for trying some items with their 100% return policy.

If you compared the component costs of prepackaged gaming systems from Alienware, etc, you will find you achieve some savings, but such savings could evaporate quickly if you ruin something while at it, which is easyto do if you start overclocking. Trust me, you will try, especially when the GPU often comes with that on day 1.

To me at least, PC Gaming excels at extreme graphics and much more immersive gaming when it comes to MMOs. If you do not wish to get suckered into literally thousands of dollars just to play one game, then might I suggest games from Blizzard? Their games are more scalable, and some are fun even with reduced graphics. Starcraft 2 for example is an enduring classic strategy game. Watch some webcasts on youtube from the likes of Huskystarcraft. And watch the pros play this simple, yet addicative game.

1.) True

2.) Paper my ass :P I have crossfire and it's gang busters since AMD past the Radeon 6xxx series scale like gang bustas!

3.) Depends on the engine, it's better for texture streaming, for example, some UE3 games(Tera comes to mind) and id Tech 5(Rage). I noticed a significant boost in that category after I went SSDs.

4.) For gaming you'd be correct ^^b

5.) True, makes no sense to change all that shit right now since it's a second gen i5

6.) Agreed, the person doesn't need anything new for now, a video card and PSU would do the trick.

7.) Some people just have too much money to spend? :P

@dahuman

On CF: I'm not disputing higher FPS. Watch the techreport link and observer the microstutter though. I don't think it's worth it, unless you can't get that performance level at all with a single card (which is not what he's talking about)

It's more like turn off V-Sync to get as high FPS as possible so you can cap people better online, not to mention the naked eye can't see it unless it's really just programmed that badly like pre-patched BF3 hahaha.

The faster the SLI/Crossfire set-up the less likely you are to see Micro stutter.
Also if you go high-end triple GPU's you are likely not to experience it at all.

Well, the resolution defnitely needs to be 1080p, but as for games, I have no idea. This is why I want to make minimal improvements to my PC. I was actually going to make another thread about what PC games I should try. I might just make that thread today, since my questions for this thread have pretty much been answered.