[Wyuetuev]

I've had this system for about a year and a half now.

3800X2 2.0Ghz
2Gb Pc3200, 2-3-2-5
7800gt 256mb
550w Antec PSU

I know its not new now, but it used to be really good specs. Used to be pretty proud of it, until I actually turned it on and read about how someone with a single core and a 6800gt could get better fps than me. No I don't mean bragging rights fps like some people do like 60++ ect. I mean I can barely get 20Fps in games like Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft. It almost always hovers around 20-25Fps and I can visually tell the difference, its like moving in slow motion. This is on low setting by the way.Sometimes if I stand still in an open area in WoW I might reach 40. In some games its the same on low and high, the setting doesn't really matter it just won't play properly and I truly don't understand it. I've taken it to the repair man in my town a few times but he never helped any other than to create new problems by putting graphics card/sound card on the same IRQ.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've got the most current drivers, also tryed older ones.

Edited by Wyuetuev, 31 October 2007 - 10:03 PM.

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Hello Wyuetuev,

What size hard drive do you have and manufacturer? How much data is stored on hard drive? When was the last time you defragmented your hard drive?

[jtscustomcomputers]

Hello Wyuetuev,

What size hard drive do you have and manufacturer? How much data is stored on hard drive? When was the last time you defragmented your hard drive?

[Wyuetuev]

Hello Wyuetuev,

What size hard drive do you have and manufacturer? How much data is stored on hard drive? When was the last time you defragmented your hard drive?

2 250gb sata2 drives, western digital. I have about 230gb used on one, the other has 70gb left. Defraged with 0&0 last week.

Graphics card gets up to 78 degrees during a full load, could that be causing problems?

Edited by Wyuetuev, 01 November 2007 - 12:48 AM.

[jtscustomcomputers]

Hello Wyuetuev,

2 250gb sata2 drives, western digital. I have about 230gb used on one, the other has 70gb left. Defraged with 0&0 last week.

Graphics card gets up to 78 degrees during a full load, could that be causing problems?

The temperature on card may be a little on high side. Do you have good case flow, cables organized and out of way, fans nice and clean? This would help to get temps down a little more. The amount of hard drive space full can cause some system performance loss. If you have a lot of startup apps running in background can also cause a system performance loss. The other big performance hog I see which can affect computers is running Norton, Trend, or McAffee AV products. There are many good av solutions listed within these forums if that were the case.

I would start wth basic system cleaning and ensuring you have sufficient airflow. The next step would be to clean up the hard drives of excess data and unused games then run a system defrag once completed.

If running windows xp lose the xp themes. Go to start-settings-control panel-system- then click advanced tab. Click on settings under performance,then click adjust system for best performance then click on apply.

This would be where I would start.

Edited by jtscustomcomputers, 01 November 2007 - 01:17 AM.

[Wyuetuev]

Hello Wyuetuev,

2 250gb sata2 drives, western digital. I have about 230gb used on one, the other has 70gb left. Defraged with 0&0 last week.

Graphics card gets up to 78 degrees during a full load, could that be causing problems?

The temperature on card may be a little on high side. Do you have good case flow, cables organized and out of way, fans nice and clean? This would help to get temps down a little more. The amount of hard drive space full can cause some system performance loss. If you have a lot of startup apps running in background can also cause a system performance loss. The other big performance hog I see which can affect computers is running Norton, Trend, or McAffee AV products. There are many good av solutions listed within these forums if that were the case.

I would start wth basic system cleaning and ensuring you have sufficient airflow. The next step would be to clean up the hard drives of excess data and unused games then run a system defrag once completed.

If running windows xp lose the xp themes. Go to start-settings-control panel-system- then click advanced tab. Click on settings under performance,then click adjust system for best performance then click on apply.

This would be where I would start.

I have 4 case fans. 2 on the front, 1 on the back, 1 on the side. Wires arent everywhere but they arent neat either. Even with the side off the case the temps are rather high. I think its the heatsink. I use AVG anti-virus. Not many startup apps. I have 2gb ram but I have -never- seen it use more than 800mb in task manager, it barely uses over 600mb.

I know turning down themes would free up some ram but what would cause a last years gaming pc to run so crappy on 2004 games meanwhile people with alot worse graphics cards run the game 2x better. I usually use 1280x1024 resolution, nothing big. Things aren't on high. What would cause this?>< I really wish I could just get rid of it and get a new one but I dont have the money right now.

[jtscustomcomputers]

Hello Wyuetuev,

2 250gb sata2 drives, western digital. I have about 230gb used on one, the other has 70gb left

You are using over 400 gigs of hard drive up which can really affect your performance.

Do you have another external drive or computer you could move some data to?

Edited by jtscustomcomputers, 01 November 2007 - 12:18 PM.

[Wyuetuev]

Nope, im out of space =/, you think freeing up most of the hard drive space would fix everything?I can probably get a new one

[jtscustomcomputers]

Hello,

Freeing up your hard drives would probably really help. When drives are loaded with that much data the performance can really drop off. I find on my own setup every two years I need to start from scratch and do a full system reinstall(this when I like to do system upgrade). My main setup is raid 500 gig. It is rare most people go two years without a reformat, I have been lucky to go that far on current setup. I do clean out my drive every few months. I do a lot of video editing which is taxing on a system and fills the drive quickly. I like to buy external drive cases for $30 then place a fast large drive in them for $80-$120. I usually try to salvage my older drives for the external storage. These drives now contain my large video files and backups of important folders. I have double redundancy of my photos and important data just in my external drives alone. Every few months I am able to offload 40-60 gigs from my main drives. The external drive cases come in handy when I service computers most particuliarly if I am trying to recover data from bad drive or failing drive.

Edited by jtscustomcomputers, 01 November 2007 - 03:11 PM.

[Troy]

Hi - just a quick thought I've had:

You say you have 4 case fans, it's possible that these may be facing the wrong way and causing turbulence, which won't help the cooling situation. I would make sure the fans are all setup blowing in the right direction. What you want to achieve is airflow from the bottom-front to the top-rear and out.



If your fans are fine, then you can just ignore me It's just a thought I've had, and too much heat can cause performance issues. Still continue to work with J. T. on the hard drives, which also sounds like could be affecting performance. Even I find that if a hard drive is half-full, my system will start slowing down, so I'll add another one. My wife says "why, it's only half-full?"

[jtscustomcomputers]

One can never have enough hard drives.

[spoon007]

just asking is FPS- first person shooter or frames per second. And if it is frames per second it it better to have a higher FPS?

[Titan8990]

FPS can mean both but in this instance it is frame per second. Higher frames per second is always better. Once you hit about 60 FPS going any higher is basically unnoticable.

[Wyuetuev]

Well this could be something. I've never seen a game use over 600mb of my memory. If its struggling to play shouldnt it use more resources like cpu power/ram/gpu memory?Isnt that room for the game to improve its performance?

[spoon007]

check if your RAM is faulty. That could always be the trouble!

[jtscustomcomputers]

Hello Wyuetuev,

If it is struggling to play it could be a sign that the data transfer rates are not up to par (signs of full hard drive), improper data transfer mode settings, running improper video setting, video card outdated for game, malware slowing down system, or a memory problem. Heat can be an issue but the sign of an overheating video card would be some type of artifacting occurring in games and higher temps. I would expect to see most games using only about 350 to 450 megs of memory max.

Edited by jtscustomcomputers, 03 November 2007 - 05:07 AM.