Going from a 9800pro to a 7800GS -- Need Help!

I recently purchased at 7800GS to replace my aging 9800pro. I uninstalled everything properly, cleaned off the old drivers with Driver Cleaner Pro, and installed the most up to day forceware drivers i could find. I was expecting a substantial performance increase due to the fact that people had told me the 7800gs was roughly twice as fast as a 9800pro. Whether that is true or not...I'm not sure, but I have experienced a DROP in performance with my upgrade. My system components are as follows:

P4 Northwood 2.6gHz 800mHz FSB
1gb Corsair XMS pc-3200
120gb HD
Gigabyte MB

In some cases, I do experience a higher MAX framerate...but this is not consistant. However when there are intense battle sequences and close combat, my framerate drops to a point about 15-20 fps lower than it would be with the 9800pro under the same situation.

The best example of this poor performance is in Counterstrike: Source.
Quake 4 runs about the same on both cards and HL2 is also about equal.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated as I am very dissapointed in the performance I have received. Thanks in advance for any advice you guys could give me.

I have a 7800GS and it's a great AGP card, it performed above expectations in most games.

Run 3dmark05 if you can and report back.

Set your drivers to high performance mode first.

Good point here. In the graphics settings it may be set to auto apply AA and AF?

I appreciate your quick responses! I currently run them at 1280x1024 resolution as it is the native resolution for my monitor. I hvae turned my settings in the nVidia control panel to high performance. AA and Anisotropic filtering are both set to 'application preference'. The funny thing is that my framerates don't really vary when I lower the resolution or turn off AA which I thought was very strange. Also, my framerate seems to decrease as I change settings in game and continue playing. I really don't know what that is about...

Also, I am aware of the 8800 specific drivers. Once I get home, I will post my drivers version.

Again, any help is greatly appreciated.

Thats funny thats what i upgraded to form my 9800pro except i have amd 3000+ but anywaz i dont know why it would be doing that. And i know its not AA or anti because i run half-Life 2 At 1680x? (i forgot the exact), 4x AA and 16x anti. What i did when i got the card was did a reformat b/c my system was cluttered at the time anywaz. You might just want to do that and see if that solves the problem.

Something tells me is the drivers...

Make sure you are using Forceware 93.71

I would say that there is something else that is messing up your pc. Maybe spyware as you said is eating sources.

My friend can play CS source with maximum settings and antilealising 4x with a 6600GT Athlon XP 2.0Ghz and 512 of Ram.

I DONT KNOW HOW TO SAY THAT!

but you get the idea 8)

See...that's just it. I am running the games on the same settings with both cards. Like I said earlier, the card can produce brief moments of higher MAX framerate....however it drops lower than the 9800 did under intense graphical sequences. That is just very odd to me.

Something else to note: When I first start a game of CS: Source, my framerate will be between 80-90. After I play a round or so, I can go back to that same spot and look in the same direction in game and only get 55-60 fps. That to me sounds like a heat issue, but my card only gets up to 44-46 degrees C...which doesn't seem that hot to me for a graphics card.

I agree that your motherboard may not have proper support as it is installed right now, but I suggest you upgrade the firmware on the motherboard (flash it) and your problems may disappear. Often they make updates to handle new types of graphics cards.

Bruce

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000 GT. My PSU is an Allied AL-B450E 450w.

Cold Bug? My 7800GS started to run very badly when I moved my computer to a colder room in the house. I heard about a "Cold Bug" affecting some of the Nvidia cards where they ran terrible until warmed up. It fit my profile and then I flashed the bios to remove the temperature monitoring. Since then.. all has been good. Try running 3Dmark or something first and then playing your game. If you see an improvement.. maybe its the cause.

Wouldn't this processor be a major bottleneck? I wouldn't think that you would realize anything close to the full potential of your new card with it......

Okay, I flashed the BIOS on my motherboard and I'm still having the same problem. Does anyone know if my particular motherboard (Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000) has problems with the voltage regulators only running at 5 amps instead of the required 6 amps?