Why can't my PC run games well?

[Blackout0189]

Hello everyone, I wanted to get your guys' input on why my PC is not able to run any current-gen games well. Here are the details:

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Dell Studio 540
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU Processor (E7500 @ 2.93GHz 2.93 GHz)
4GB RAM

Graphics card is EVGA Geforce 8400 GS 1024MB DDR3 (there are videos of people playing current-gen games on YouTube with this card and it runs smoothly)

I don't see what is bad here, yet I can hardly run Team Fortress 2 on normal settings. I have to turn them all to low, and even then, when there is a lot of chaos in-game, the frame rate drops and I can barely play. I have disabled all the startup programs I could, and stopped all the services I could in msconfig. I don't have any other programs running while gaming.

What is the problem?

 

[rajaawad23]

what resolution do you play at?

 

[Brett928S2]

Hi

The 8400 is ANCIENT...you NEED A NEWER card...

All the best Brett

 

[Blackout0189]

what resolution do you play at?

1680 x 1050

 

[neo_classical]

According to Steam, the minimum requirements are: 1.7 GHz Processor, 512MB RAM, DirectX® 8.1 level Graphics Card (Requires support for SSE), Windows® 7 (32/64-bit)/Vista/XP...
However, Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007 and at the time your card was 15th rank in Tom's GPU charts: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/graphics-cards-gaming,review-29792-6.html
With updates to the game, I think now that you'll get even worse performance with that card. I think you need to update.

 

[rajaawad23]

your system is not up for that job. team fortress at your resolution will need a newer GPU. plus your CPU is not that fast to start with. I reccomend buying your self a new system, if not buy your self a new GPU hd 5770 + or gtx 550 +
should be pretty cheap on ebay.