games stuttering

Hello

I just put together a new system, and all the basic functions work fine.

When I load up Unreal Tournament 3 however, it doesn't run so good. It will run silky smooth for a while, but then drop to like 2 frames per second for a few seconds. Then it will go back to smooth again. A few times it even crashed the game during one of these stutters.
I'm not sure if its just random times, or if it stutters when some new effect or texture comes on screen. Hard to tell.

Team Fortress 2 does the same thing....smooth, stutter, smooth, stutter.

Heres my machine:

Vista Home Premium SP1
Asus M3N78 EMH HDMI mobo
Athlon X2 6000+
2 gigs Crucial Ballistix Dual Channel RAM
XFX Geforce 8600 GTS XXX --- 175.19 driver
1 IDE drive, 2 Sata drives
Realtek HD onboard audio
Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum

Thanks

I have the wrong driver?
I went to 'Geforce' >> 'geforce 8 series' >> 'vista 32bit'
and it brought me to the 175.19 page.

Which drivers are right?

what range of settings and res's have you tried.

Ditto for SpinachEater.

Thats a 256mb card no? Sounds like your running your textues/IQ to high and are running outta frame buffer forcing the card to get info outta main memory. When that happens your game will most definitely stutter,and at that point increasing system ram will fix nothing.

After you check 86's suggestion,if it still isn't fixed, load up UT3. Rip around til it bogs and check your hd led light,if its lighting up for a bit while it bogs you are running outta system ram,if it doesn't your probably running outta vram on your vid card.

WOW, so many suggestions.
My old machine was slower than my current one, and it ran UT3 just fine with 2 gigs RAM. My new one is significantly faster (CPU and RAM especially)

-I will try rolling back the driver. I beleive UT3s website recomends a certain verion. I'll try that.

- I don't have any programs running except for the Zboard software (which I'll try turning off). Its a fresh windows install

-The hard drive the game is on is a Sata 3G, brand new. Windows is on an older IDE (7200rpm) drive. I'll watch the hard drive light next time, maybe that will give me a hint.

-It has an onbaord Geforce 8200 which is disabled (I think). It doesn't show up in the device manager.

-I havn't tried the dual core optimizer. I havn't heard of HDD indexing, how do I do that?

Many thanks for the suggestions.

Unstall Vista, go back to XP, everything will work. Or buy 2 more gigs of ram and it still might not work.

If it was running those games fine before at the same settings its not the video ram then,and most likely not the system ram.It could very well be a driver problem,but its affecting both games so i'm thinking chipset drivers.Do you have the latest nforce drivers installed?

I installed the drivers off the disc that came with the mobo, but havn't updated since then. Definatly worth a try too.

My systen RAM is new. Assuming its working properly, it should be faster. I had old 184pin ram before, now I have 2GB of dual channel (800 mhz)

I've got a lot to try when I get off work in 2 hours..LOL

The sound card was carried over from my last machine too, and it worked fine.
On my new board I can't seem to disable the Realtek audio in the BIOS. Once I applied service pack 1, the 2 audio device seem to get along ok. I just have to go to the audio devices window, and pick which one I want.

I tried the game before installing the sound blaster, and it was stuttering then. I tried disabling the realtek in windows too, but that didn't make any difference either.

still having no luck

-I reinstalled the latest graphics driver.

-I tried the dual core driver, but it wouldn't install

-I installed the chipset driver, which included:
Ethernet Driver (v67.72) WHQL
SataIDE Driver (v10.3.0.21) WHQL
RAID Driver (v10.3.0.21) WHQL
RAIDTOOL (v10.3.0.21)
SMBus (v4.63) WHQL
SMU (v1.39) WHQL

I'll note that when the stuttering occurs, the hard drive DOES NOT blink anymore than normal, nor do I hear it crunching away.

I'm going to install Crysis, see how that does. It may help to narrow down my problem

Crysis is even worse. It freezes temperarily, and is accompanied by an annoying noise too.

I pulled out the sound blaster card, and disabled the HDMI and digital ports on the motherboard. Unless the Realtek audio is causing the problem, at least I can eliminate sound devices as the cause

I have stuttering also with the same videocard, i tought was because low vram or something with the videocard, because the more transform and lighning u use, or more shaders more stuttering u have.

But dont know this have to be cpu problem or mobo.

You might want to borrow a friend's PSU and see if it works alright with that.

If you have an old 200 or 250 watt PSU, you might be pushing it, especially if that's the 125w version of the 6000+.

Regardless, I'd say check that. Also, try a clean install of Vista.

You can also try going back to your old mobo.

The PSU is brand new. Its 650 watts. It should be more than enough.
I just put the system together, so it is a clean install of Vista.
My old mobo is fried...doesn't work.

The only thing I can think of doing at this point is installed windows again on one of the faster drives. I really don't want to do that if I can help it though.

I've found out that it's not just games that are stuttering now. I was streaming a video the other day, and that was freezing and stuttering as well.