What's the bottleneck here?

[eilif]

So yeah i have an old system that i have been upgrading trying to be able to play some of my games.
Specs:

Pentium 4 2.8 GHz
ATi Radeon HD 3650 512 MB DDR2
1.75 GB of RAM
80 GB HDD (old IDE)
Windows XP Home
250W PSU

I see alot of people with almost the same specs (pentium 4, hd 3650) that are able to play CoD4, MW2 etc.

I can get CoD2 to run smoothly on lowest settings, but CoD4 laggs.
It tuns with about 40 FPS, but for some reason, it plays like 20 FPS. It is very laggy.

I have tried running 3dmark 03, and i got 5645 points.

What is wrong with my system?
It meets the requirements of CoD4 (Pentium 4 2.4 GHz), so why is it running so bad?
I got a feeling that it is Windows that is casuing it, as it is running very slow, may this be my problem?

 

[Toxxyc]

The reason it runs so bad is because the whole system is old. The CPU is still matching the requirements, yes, but the graphics card isn't very strong and the hard drive is very likely very slow as well. There is little to be done about this except a large upgrade, unfortunately. Also, what resolution do you game at?

 

[dhicks19]

yes new pc basically

 

[geekapproved]

The entire pc needs an upgrade from top to bottom. Just cause you meet the minimum system requirements for a games does not mean it's going to run good. it's going to run minimally.

3dmark03? You know what year it is now right? I mean dual core cpu's came out in 2005, the majority are running quad cores and octo-core desktop cpu's are coming out any day now. 16 core server cpu's have already shipped by AMD.

Your still running a single core with less than 2gb of ram and Windows XP. Time for an upgrade.

 

[bucknutty]

I have a p4 3.2 with HT and 2 gigs of 400mhz ram. It has an agp 3850 in it. This is a bit better than the minimum system specs, it struggles to play MW2 on anything other than the lowest settings. Bottom line is that old P4 is just not fast enough. I would not recomend spending any money on that system, rather i would consider building a new one.