New GeForce GTX 470 slower than GeForce 8800

OK once you have taken care of the software issues in adition to the drivers you may need to wipe the settings config files for some games. Overclock the cpu to 3ghz and upgrade to a 64bit os unless you got specific software requirements.

Another possible problem could be the power supply. Your new video card uses over 100W more than your old one. It could not be getting enough power to run properly. What size psu is in that Dell?

What´s your PSU?
The GTX 470 is a really power hungry gpu.

Thank you for the replies!

JackNaylorPE: I did not wipe the old drives before installing the new card (argh! noob mistake). I will try that as soon as I get home from work today, and see if that doesn't resolve my issues...

nforce4max: Why do I get the sense I might basically have installed a Rolls Royce Engine on a Tractor;)? Anyway, if the reinstall of the drivers does not help, I will look into this...

orangegator and Dominaz1: The Power Supply Unit is a 750 Watt MAX model DT50E, so that should be sufficient I think...

Try to Overclock Cpu,The Card is not using its potential power.Anyways Does this keeps happening in everygame you play?or just those 2?

Some users interpret the page tearing of having vsync off with a choppy feeling, does this cover you?

I noticed that for some games to feel smooth(mostly old quake 3 based games, but yeah)I needed vsync(removed page tearing and generally feels smoother) and triple buffering(prevents sudden fps drops) on.

May be worth a try(in game and Nvidia control panel). This will lower overall frame rates to 60, but will prevent fps changes that can be noticed by some users as well. Note this may cause a slight mouse lag, you will be able to see for your self.

What 8800 card was it? GTX, GTS 320, 640, 512?

It will work but using such a powerful card when it can be put to better use is just wasting it. If it is something that you really want to do then there is no one stopping you but just don't want you making the mistake. However there may be one or two things to justify though. Fold @ home and running cuda based programs off all the gpus. One client per gpu and you can load both cards. I once was friends with one who had two gtx 295 and even then used a 9800gt in the mix as well for extra monitors and to speed up encoding. As for me the one thing I want to waste money on is to try to get three dirst cheap gts 250 or gtx 2xx and put them in tri sli on my 780i rig. However I would be wasting my money on a system that is hardly ever used.

Good luck though but getting a second gtx 580 and going sli that way is the best option and I suggest that you look through the history of dual gpu cards and their problems before getting a gtx 590.

^^ There should be no reason to format for a driver install issue, none. Thats like admitting you don't have a clue what the problem is, so you hide it to make it go away.

PSU looks fine. Use driver sweeper to kill the old drivers, then install the new WHQL after a reboot.

Also, its possible the Q6600 could end up being a bottleneck, but the 460 should still be funcionally better...

Best answer selected by eveng.

Okay, after a couple of afternoons of tormenting my computer I have the following observations:

First of all thanks for great ideas and suggestions, although I suspect that If I don't understand more than 50% of a procedure to do "something", it is probably not a good idea to try it yet;)...

That being said, I did a clean sweep of the drives, using a 3 page procedure I found (haven't got the link here, but can post if anyone is interested)...
I bungled the Drive Sweeper (I got a .NET error message of some kind)
Soldering on, and achieving more or less the expected results though I suspect in an unnecessary brutal manner, I managed to rip out most of anything NVIDIA related, after which I installed the drivers again as suggested by JackNaylorPE above.

I then had an ephiphany and went into the "setting / graphic" menus for the games in question (Mass Effect 2 and Age of Conan) changing those to dx10 (or in Mass Effect 2's case, asking for it to re-scan the computer)...

That seems to have resolved the graphic glitches at least, though by that time it was quite late so I haven't had the chance to try it out properly yet...

malmental, nforce4max and mrjericho1991: You are probably right that I could get more out of the graphics card, and that the rest of the rig is holding it back, though I think I will let it be for now as long as the rest works out. Will most likely have to play around with some of the game settings so I will see about that first;)...