PC Problem (dunno if this is the right forum)

I've got a decent system, spec;

Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz 200mhz bus speed,
Asustek P4S800 ACPI BIOS Revision 1010,
2x512Mb PC2700 166Mhz DDR Ram,
x800xl 256mb Graphics card,
And the norm decent hard disc and good monitor.

My problem is that when I enter games its always lagging. This card is actually doing worse than my old 9550 radeon one, and I can find no cause for it. I've reinstalled windows, I've updated all the drivers, removed the card and put it in again, updated the bios, even streamlined the games as much as possible, and its still crawling. I used Halflife 2 as a benchmark (using the IG netgraph to see what FPS I was getting. As soon as I was outdoors, explosions were happening, or alot of people on the screen at once, it started to hit as low as 9 FPS. I've got all the hardware needed to play the game, and I'm still worse off with this new card to my older one. Help please! I can't see any hardware weakness, and I've done everything I know about using the system to sort the problem, to no avail.

Thanks in advance,
-Boffin.

Yeah, I am running it at the same resolution (1024x768) in the games. The only thing I can think could be accounting for any of this is some sort of bottlenecking and/or driver issue. I've looked at every site known to me on the internet about tweaking, my hardware, etc. And I really can't seem to find anything of great interest! Its just infuriating because I bought this card to make my computer run better and smoother and its totally underperforming.

Right I used www.pcpitstop.com to test out my machine and see what it is. Everything came up as A ok apparently, which I find father unusual. What it did point out that my card was way under performing on some sort of scale they use (I think it was million pixels per second or something). Anyway, I've tried backdating the drivers, tried the omega ones too, and so forth to no avail. I wonder if it could just be the card that's a dud?

man buy yourself some pc3200 ddr and things might get better for you.

Actually, that might be an issue - it could be power or heat.

Try pointing a fan at the heatsink, see if you can make it cooler.

I suspect you'd see visual artifacts rather than a slowdown, but it's worth a try!