Graphic card low performance

You need to tell us your full system spec and screen size and some FPS in a game we can relate to such as Crysis?

What are you using to measure your GPU's usage?

I'm a bit noobish at all of this. I actually don't know any good programs which I could use to measure my GPU's usage.
I have Pentium dual core E 6500 @ 2.93GH, 3g DDR3, 480g ata HDD. I assume everything else is irrelevant.
I'm a gamer for a very, very long time and I could tell when the game is running smooth with 40-60+ FPS and off course when its lower than 30 FPS.
I've downloaded some benchmark program and tested it out on 1440x900 with almost every feature turned on, with the results of min:7 fps and average: 12fps.
After that I even lowered for about 20% of the benchmark quality test and the results were even worse.
The graphic card is my brother's, he was using it for about 2-3 years. He played crysis 1. and he did it on high-very high quality(considering that there is ultra high option as well) and told me that he had decent-smooth game. He has a widescreen so i would say it was 1440x900 resolution.
After reading dozens of posts here, i noticed how one should delete all previous graphic drivers before installing the new ones. Since with the previous graphic card I had allot better performance before i installed the new drivers. After that, every game that I've played before was running worse, and it was pretty much worse.
So I found some program "driver sweeper" and cleaned most of the drivers, couldnt clean 3 out of 20 or more. Anyhow I installed the new drivers again and tried it out on "homefront" and with 1440x900 and most of the things are on medium or turned off, its hardly 20fps.
If you could tell me some of the better programs that will show more precise results, I'll Google it/test my gpu and post the results so you could have a better picture of my case.
I'm really sorry for this long a.. post, didn't know how to explain my situation differently.
Thanks again for your time,
Regards

Download and run 'MSI Afterburner' it will display a graph of the cards usage, temp and fan speeds. If you have a play about with it you might even be able to figure out the OSD which will show those readings whilst you are gaming.

All right so you had a 3850 before right? There is no 3750. What is your RAM speed and are you running it in dual channel mode? What motherboard do you have? What PSU do you have? It's possible the PSU is not adequate.

@mousemonkey will do tomorrow as soon as i get back home. Then I ll get back with the numbers.
@megamanx yeah my bad, I just picked up the box, its: ati radeon hd 3850 series graphics accelerator. I was once with my f when he was buying the 3870, so i ve must ve mixed up the numbers. My ram speed is...umm, its 3 gigabytes, its in 2 slots, so its 1 with 2g and 1 with 1. Its ddr3 and i dont know how to check their speed. My psu is 500w, and the other readings indicate that it should be enough for the graphic card. But then again, i could be wrong. I guess that "msi afterburner" will tell everything that we need to know?

I dled and installed MSI Afterburner. Played Homefront on 1366x768 with medium details and with anisotropic filtering/v sync/anti-aliasing/fps smoothing settings were OFF. Had some significant mouse delay, hardly 20 fps during most of the play time.
The MSI Afterburner showed me in game that graphic card was around 65C and was always on 24% usage. As soon as the game is loaded it goes on 24% and doesn't drop nor goes up.
I've ran MSI Kombustor and heres a link of the screen shot with the results
http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/7237/picvgp.jpg
That's all I have, I hope any of you could come to some ideas what could possibly be wrong and help me out with this problem.
Regards,
Srdjan

I wonder if your PCIe slot has decided to run at x4 speed or something?

How can I check that?

Download and run CPUz, the 'Mainboard' tab will tell you what your slot is currently running at.

link width 16x/max supported 16x
I guess that's the thing you asked?

Yes, and that is what it should say. Other than something from your old drivers hanging about or driver cleaner messing with something it shouldn't have I can't think of why your card would only be running at 24% usage.

Could it be that the Driver sweeper didnt do the job?
As I ve said, I had my old graphic card ati 3850, which was running for more than 3 months perfect...as soon as I downloaded new drivers from their official site, it started running with somethin like 50% worse than it was. I tried to roll back the drivers and it was still the same. So I left it at that point...And a couple of days ago I got 9800 gtx and I installed the newest drivers, but as soon as I saw it running I knew it was crippled as the last one.
I was reading this forum for the past 2 days and saw how a weak cpu can affect the graph card. But knowing how the 1st one was doing great and after the new drivers it was screwed, I d say the rest of the configuration is fine.
Should I try to find some different program to clean my drivers and reinstall them again? Really don't know what to do.

This may seem a bit brutal but I would decide which card to stick to and then wipe and reinstall Windows with the chosen card from the get go.

The friend that I mentioned that bought the ati 3870 a few years ago, has absolutely the same problem. Had it running perfect until he installed the new drivers. He formatted his pc several times with different OS and still didnt solve the prob...

Your friend could have just had a component start to fail. As for you I wonder if it's some sort of driver conflict. Anyway, the latest driver isn't always the best one for your card, especially an older one like the 9800GTX. I say format your computer and then try using an older driver like the 197. Since you didnt list your OS I'm assuming Vista or Win 7 64-bit, but if that's not it download the appropriate driver for your OS

http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7_winvista_64bit_197.45...

The 275.33 driver works just fine on my 8800GT, so it's not an 'older card' thing.

I installed "Driver Cleaner Pro" and managed to delete all drivers which were for my graphic card. Installed the new drivers again and in the meantime I bought a new PSU, and the problem was fixed. The graphic card runs great, usage goes to 98-99%.
Now I don't know for sure which of these two were making the problem, could ve been both. Anyway, I'm glad its over.
I thank you for all the help, really appreciate it.
Regards,
Srdjan