Tearing my hair out - advice desperately needed!

Hey everyone, I'm having a frustrating experience here and was hoping if maybe the collective wisdom of the forums could help me tip toe through the minefields of figuring out how to solve my problem (how's that for an esoteric metaphor?).

I built a system for myself two years ago - the specs are as follows:

AMD Athlon 64x2 4200+
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
2 gigs of DDR 333 RAM
LanParty NF4 Series Mobo
Windows XP Home
Antec Neopower 480 RTL PSU

It was a great gaming rig when I got it, but lately it's been showing some signs of age, or so I thought. I'd been thinking about doing a complete overhaul, and talked to a few people in various forums here about ideas, and the consensus was that this system should have another year or so of life left in it. I was skeptical, because I'd been noticing a drop-off in performance over time, but that was mostly conjecture and feeling with no hard testing.

I figured that maybe I just hadn't kept up on maintenance, so this past weekend I did a complete service of the machine; deep virus scan, adware scan, registry cleaner, uninstalled old programs I never use anymore, cleaned old shortcuts etc., installed the latest video card drivers, and topped it all off with an overnight defrag. I even went so far as to create a separate gaming profile with all the unnecessary services turned off, nothing but essentials starting in the system tray, and with all the themes turned off and a plain blue background.

Windows runs a lot smoother, but no real change in gaming peformance.

Evil or Very Mad

On a lark I picked up a copy of the new Command and Conquer RTS that just came out today - installed it and fired it up, and the frame rate was awful. What confused me though was by default it put all the settings on maxium - I had to tone them down to medium just to get it to be halfway playable.

So then I did a little more research, sifted through a lot of forums, and found out people with systems comperable to mine were having silky smooth gameplay (or so they say).

This stuck in my craw, but it was still just "people talking" and nothing empirical; I wanted peer reviewed research, dammit! So I downloaded the latest version of 3dMark and ran it, and was absolutely stunned by the results.

I scored a total of 3178.
According to their analysis among 501 similar systems I was almost at the bottom of the barrel with the lowest score being 3017 and the highest being 8227. Of all systems (well over a million) two-thirds of them scored higher than I did, with the fastest topping out at a whopping 23850.



Now, for all I know 3dMark doesn't like dual core systems and maybe I needed to disable the second core, but I don't think so.

So I come before you all with a plea... what the hell is wrong with my machine? Especially considering I just did a full service on it.

Any thoughts at all?

Much thanks - I'm tearing my hair out here!


-Bolgard

You have a good pc so that's not the problem i think. You could look in drivers for everything.
You could also try reformatting everything, if my pc runs slow, that does the job!

Stupid question - if I reformatted my drive, if there's messed up stuff on other drives (I have 2 others connected to my PC) would that make a difference? Would any infected crap, or what have you, make it back onto my main drive?

And when you say "look in drivers for everything" do you just mean update every driver?

Go here and download the AMD Dual-Core Optimizer and the
AMD Athlonâ„¢ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor Driver for Windows XP
and Windows Server 2003 Version (x86 and x64 exe) 1.3.2.16

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/Techni...1_13118,00.html

Hey does that driver work on Opterons?

Yes, I used them with both the X2 and Opty cpu's :-)

About those 3dmarks. The one with 8000 points is AT LEAST overclocking his gfx card, I dunno about the rest of his system. Hmm, overclocked his cpu by 700 Mhz too.