What is my bottleneck?

CPU Type: QuadCore Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, 2400 MHz (9 x 267)
Motherboard Name: EVGA E175
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 (896 MB) (Running two monitors at 1680x1050)
Audio Adapter: Realtek ALC888/1200 @ nVIDIA nForce 430i (MCP51) - High Definition Audio Controller
Ram: 4x Corsair XMS2 CM2X1024-6400C4 1 GB DDR2-800 DDR2 SDRAM (5-5-5-18 @ 400 MHz) (4-4-4-13 @ 270 MHz)

Running windows vista 64 bit.

Many games are running very, very poorly. I don't belive i have a bad setup, what do i need to upgrade? Also I just reformatted a month ago, and defrag every wednesday

Nothing wrong with that machine.

Check temps of your components and make sure your psu is enough is the standard advice given with these things.

All of the ram is the exact same, just updated my video driver yesterday as I thought that may be the culprit

Warhammer Online for example runs ridiculously poor. On the lowest settings it either stutters for no reason or just goes into slide show mode.

Also there are a lot of just hitches within windows. Many times it stutters, or things just go unresponsive.

I downloaded the RC of windows 7 from microsoft yesterday, thinking I'm going to install that tonight as I've heard good things performance wise.

Here are my temps from speedfan, unfortunately I don't really know much about this or where they should be at. my case is an antec 900 so there shouldn't be a shortage of airflow/fans

GPU: 62C
System: 85C
CPU: 29C
AUX: 31C
HD0: 28C
HD1: 32C
Temp1: 40C
Core 0: 37C
Core 1: 37C

Thanks for the all the help guys

I think I had the same problem when I built my new system as well. Go to your hardware manager, open the properties for your hard drive and make sure both boxes are checked under the optimize for performance section. That's what I did and it helped tremendously. Hope it helps you out.

Yes, I think speedfan just had osme sort of issue seeing them.

So should I look into overclocking the processor? its something I've never done before but I've heard that these processors can get up there pretty easily

Thanks for all the help guys, I'm going to try out windows 7 and see how much of a difference it makes. I don't think I should be having this many issues even with just windows.

Any tips would be appreciated

CPU would have nothing to do with a game running badly. Q6600 is a very popular cpu and most people do not overclock it and seeing as you don't hear them complaining in huge numbers I assume they have no problems.

I have tested my own comp with it running at 2.4 and it runs fine, that is with a 4870x2, no bottlenecking to report as far as I can see.