These days I'm running a lowish end pre-boxed unit that I recieved as a gift. The general specs are a Phenom Quad Core 9550, 3GB of DDR2 (667), a 320gb SATA 7200 rpm drive, etc. I purchased a HD 4850 for the system hoping to get a bit more performance out of it, which ended up being an HD 4870 after a free RMA upgrade from Sapphire.

Now here's my problem. I don't really play much for high end gaming, but what little I do is still suffering on this machine. I'm trying to identify what's causing me to suffer such low performance. Please feel free to let me know if I'm on the wrong track. From what I play (World of Warcraft, Source engine games like Left 4 Dead, TF2, etc) I think the 9550 and the HD 4870 should be beyond fine.

My gut is telling me that I'd see a huge upgrade in performance with a newer motherboard and faster DDR. Currently the board that came in the system is only based around the AMD 690 chipset, which I know is not making full use of the Phenom. I ran this buy a tech friend, and while he agreed that a motherboard upgrade would certainly help, he didn't feel it would be a huge difference one way or the other.

Curious to hear the community's thoughts, or if there should be other areas to look at or target. Thanks in advance!

I'd agree, while a new motherboard would help you out slightly, it's not worth it. and the ram isn't going to make a huge differnce either, a little but not much. now with that chip and video card, you shouldnt be experiencing such terrible results in games. my thoughts are that maybe your power supply isnt supplying quite enough juice to the video card. or try downloading the latest drivers. also you may want to consider for your mother board if there is any updates for the bios, so that you might potentially get more use out of the quad. also just another thought maybe one of your sticks of ram is flaky. i'd suggest run memtest86, and see what that helps you with. and just one more, but double check to make sure all power connections and data connections inside are fully connected.

Do you have a lot of background processes running, or are there potentially a few you don't know of (malware)? You're CPU should be fine for those games but it would be the bottleneck when compared to the HD4870 so it makes me think something is eatting up a bit of it's power. Also, Denty's suggestion to check driver and BIOS updates should be high on your checklist but it might be hard where you don't know the manufacturer of your motherboard or maybe not the specific model it is.

I've covered the basics, bios is up to date, chipset drivers are up to date, everything's connected properly, video drivers are the newest from ATI (Is there anything similar to Omega Drivers these days for tweaked performance?). The power supply has been upgraded from a stock unit to a Coolmaster 500W that MB recommended for the original HD 4850 (and said should work fine for the HD 4870 as well). I don't think it would be a power issue, I've had plenty of those in the past and I'm not suffering any of the typical signs. No stability issues, no brownouts, no tearing or artifacts you might see if a video card isn't getting the power it needs, etc.

Malware shouldn't be an issue, I run spyware scans regularly, don't download from problematic sources, run Firefox with noscript, etc. Taken a look at background processes and while there are probably a few extras running I don't see anything that's throwing up red flags either.



Two other things that came to mind are OS and sound card. In this age should I be concerned with onboard sound causing much/any slowdown? Also, I'm currently running Vista Home Premium 32 bit, would a change to Vista 64 be advisable?

hmmm im trying to think what else it could be, maybe hard drive issue? otherwise i dunno.

It's a pretty standard 7200 rpm hard drive's hooked up via SATA. Not a ton of space free but I think ~50gb free of 320gb. Static 8gb swap file on it. Haven't had any errors or that sort of problem with it. Anything you'd suggest to test for any issues related to it?

I have noticed a bit of stuttering going on in the source games myself, I think it might be the source engine's dual core optimization, as I have noticed a more frequent stuttering after the last tf2 update implementing the multi core rendering.
Athlon 5200
2gigs ddr2
9600gt oc

Just a thought.

I hate the guessing game so fuckin much.


Delete your video drivers. Restart --> reinstall video drivers that are updated from their web site.

After that goto CCC (Catalyst Control Centre and ensure it's on default) you mayb be forcing something retarded like 16X aa.

And buy my cpu cooler.

i may be a little off here, but try going into your bios and turn "Hardware Assisted Virtualization" (or whatever your bios calls it) off. although i think that only applies to the 9X00 series phenoms and not the 9X50 phenoms like yours.

Try older/newer cat's. That setup definitely shouldn't have any issues running that stuff.