MY games Machine

[scarecrow1]

I just upgraded to an;

AMD64bit 3000+
Gigabyte Motherboard+Nforce3 chipset
1.5 Gig of Geil High Performance PC3200 DDR400 Ram
GexCube ATI RADEON 9800XT 256MB 8x
Plenty of Hardisk space
Onboard Sound
DVD Rom + DVD Burner
WinXP Pro + Sp1

Now, this machine would be equal to waht Intel machine? 3.2 ghz?, 3ghz? and how would you rate this as a games machine? will this serve me out for HL2 and Stalker, Doom3? Because i have FarCry installed and it runs fine with some slight jerkiness he and there but the last level i played i think is called "BOAT", really brought my machine to its knees. It was the fisrt level that i actually encountered some lag, the next level had less lag but still some noticable little things compared to the earlier levels. Now, shouldn't my machine be able to run this game with the best graphics with no slowdown at all? i have the latest ATI drivers and patched farcry to the latest version but still has some slight inconveniencies. Am i missing something? something that is still required, because i was under the impression that this machine was good enough for the best high end games with the best results(smooth gameplay with nice eye candy)for this year and the next, am i wrong?
IS it the actual game that has the problem or is it me? i need to know.
Is there a way of increasing game performance?
My default settings are on Very High and no AA, AF is medium or LOW, VSYNC is on, and Resolution is 1024x768, 32bit colors.
OVERDRIVE is activated with ATI Settings. Any other settings that might help?

[John Prophet]

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

XP comes with lots of "junk" running in the background that just slows it down...unneeded stuff such as "indexing service" and "wireless zero configurator" and about 20 more that you shouldnt need....if you disable the unneeded ones you save a lot of resources and free up memory.

I do this on all the XP boxes I build.

I usually follow black vipers "safe" configuration as shown in his chart on the site (except I leave system restore on)

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also there are other xp tweaks such as running the color at 16 bit as opposed to 32....turning off some of the visual effects like smooth scrolling menu boxes etc etc.

JP

[The Punisher]

John did you disable the indexing service in the service config, this was one of the ones that I was unsure of.