New Gaming Rig - Disappointing FPS

Hello,

I recently built my own gaming rig and I had a few questions about the frame rates on newer systems and what to expect out of the 6900 series graphics cards from ATI.

My specs are as follows:
MSI 890FXA-GD70 AM3 AMD 890FX
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition Thuban 3.3GHz, 3.7GHz
CORSAIR XMS 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2000
Thortech Thunderbolt 850W
Western Digital Caviar Black 7200 RPM 1TB Drive
MSI R6950 Twin Frozr II OC Radeon HD 6950 2GB

After installing all the drivers (Directx11 and CCC included) and doing a few tweaks, I loaded up Rift and expected to see frame rates of at least 50 or 60 per second considering the power of my system. I was surprised and disappointed to find that the best fps I could achieve at maximum settings at 1920x1080 resolution was a mere 25.

This rate is with every setting in the game turned all the way up, max settings and program over rides checked (on) in the CCC and vertical sync disabled.

To test the waters a bit, I started to turn down each setting individually trying to figure out which one might be giving my system a bit of a hard time. I will spare you the boring details, but I found that the FPS was improved very little, if at all, by changing these settings.

The only way I see considerable improvement in FPS is by turning the graphical settings to around "medium". This gets me up to an acceptable rate, but I'm a bit gutted after I spend $1200 to achieve mediocrity!

After that experience, I decided to further investigate the source of such low fps. I turned down every setting in the CCC and then adjusted the settings in the game between Maxed, Ultra and High and again, I saw very little difference (5-10 fps increase).

At that point I had done all that I knew to do, so I began reading threads in forums and trying to find someone else with a similar problem. According to the game's own forums, a lot of users are at a bit of a loss as to why their systems seem to be performing so insubstantially.

I was unable to locate a thread in which the user had a similar setup, but some of the information was indeed useful. I took the recommendation of several people and I installed several programs to monitor my CPU and GPU usage and now I'm even more confused.

Initially, I was concerned that my system might be bottle necked, so I looked into it. (I haven't bought a better cooler yet, so I'm still operating at the stock speed of 3.3 Ghz.) During game play, my CPU frequency is at ~90%, but the overall usage is just ~40%. The GPU seems to be working properly as it's clock speeds and usage percentages seem normal. My RAM is running at 1600 and my system temperature is around 45-50*c under full load. I know that's a bit high, and I am working on that, but even when the system is cooler the frame rates aren't any better.

I thought it might just be the game, but I've tried several others and have had similar results. In League of Legends, the frame rates are around 30 at max settings, but they shoot through the roof when I turn down all my settings in the CCC. Its puzzling to me how the game's settings can be completely maxed and operating at 100 fps until I turn on the 3D rendering options in the CCC.

As far as I can tell, there are no hardware conflicts or problems, I'm not exceeding the limitations of my CPU, there are no excess programs running in the background and the system is brand-spankin-new. What did I do wrong??

I realize that this is a lot of information, but I've found its best to give as much insight as possible to obtain an accurate estimation. Thank you for reading and I hope that someone can lend some insight and encouragement into a semi-depressing situation.