My Gaming Performance

[madMike87]

I'm currently running the following setup:
Tagan 900w Two-Series PSU
ASUS M3A 770 Motherboard
AMD Quad Phenom 9500
Powercolour ATI Radeon 4870
Western Digital Raptor 10k rpm 150gb
4gb OCZ 1000mhz RAM
LG 22" Widescreen Monitor (1680x1050)
Windows Vista Home 64 bit

Now I'm currently running all my games at my monitors native resolution with varying success. Frontlines I've got maxed out and it doesn't cause a problem. Runs pretty much perfectly and I'm also playing GRID with high settings and getting very good performance. However I've been having performance problems with TF2, Half Life 2 and UT3. UT3 differs on map and the amount of players. Half Life 2 and TF2 run perfect until quite a bit is going on and then it goes from low fps to choppy fps.

Now from reading the Steam forums, apparently Steam/Valve's 64 bit support sucks the big one and I'm thinking this could be the reason for that low performance. However I'm thinking that maybe UT3 and even everything else I'm running should be doing better than it is currently, I mean ffs I'm running an 4870 here. So I'm looking at the rest of my machine and trying to get an idea of what should be changed, baring in mind I want to run everything at my monitors native resolution.

Now a few questions:
■Beyond the 64 bit architecture, is there any other possible reason for lack of performance?
■Does chip set make a big difference in performance?

Depending on how much money I have come next month, I'm looking at getting the following:
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L iP35 Express Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600 Processor

Would this be a suitable investment? Or should I be looking at trying a 32 bit OS and seeing the performance difference with my current setup?

 

[grieve]

1) do you have the latest drivers?
2) Try XP...
3) OC the processor
4) consider new hardware after #1, #2 and #3 have been exhausted.

 

[madMike87]

1) I have all the latest drivers.
2) Thinking about it. Getting a new HDD soon, so I may test the difference.
3) I'll look into that.

 

[stoner133]

One thing to look at is if the games support mulitple CPU's. Many of the older games doen't so if any of your games don't your only playing it on a 2.2Ghz cpu. Which would be kind of slow for some.

 

[madMike87]

I won't be overclocking my CPU, because a) I'm using a stock fan and don't think it will be able to take the heat and b) the ASUS M3A from what I can see isn't a very good board for overclocking.