Low FPS with good hardware

[shocker77]

I am getting really bad frame rates in the games ive been playing, i only get about 25-40 fps in sims 3 and 30-38 fps in Rainbox Six Vegas i have all the latest drivers installed and with my harware i should be getting really high frame rates.

Im running

Ati Radeon HD4650 512mb PCI-e

Intel Core Duo E8400 stock clocked at 3.0ghz

2GB DDR2

Windows xp Home Sp2

420W Power supply

I don't know if the fact that i haven't updated to SP3 has anything to do with it but the Geek-squad representative at my local best buy couldn't even figure out the issue, i did just upgrade my motherboard and cpu but i updated all the drivers to everything on my system.

 

[shocker77]

L4D is far from graphically intensive, its great for judging CPU bottlenecks but not too good at finding graphical bottlenecks. Hell even an HD 2600XT can play it at 50FPS at 1920x1200 on very high
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-cards-charts-2009-high-quality/Left4Dead,1327.html
however it wont be able to provide better than FPS in any graphics limited game, and AA and AF are very stressful for the card, drop AA and AF and you should notice a dramatic increase in FPS for all games.

Yea it helped a lot, but i purchased the 4870 on new egg a few minutes ago, I went this far in building this computer, might as well go all the way (within a budget) thanks for the help 😀

 

[JofaMang]

I think my airflow is decent i just got a Cool Master case ($50 range) including the fans i installed i have a 120mm fan sucking in air from the front, a 80mm fan sucking air in from the side pannel and a 120mm sucking out all the hot air from the back of the case, i have room for 1 more fan on the side pannel right above the cpu, and i wanted the 1g just to be sure i dont have to upgrade within a year but if the memory only has to do with the resolutions at this point then i would rather grab a 512, BUT the same brand card with 512 is $124.99, and the 1g version has a mail in rebate deal that will end up costing me $124.99 so ide rather get the 1g just in case 😉

Turn your side fan around to exhaust air. I have an 80mm in the side of my cheap cooler master case, and tried both ways, and with it exhausting, system temps dropped dramatically. I also have 120 front, 120rear fans.