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Is Hard Drive Limiting Graphics Card?

Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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So I recently bought myself some new hardware, and I've been having some performance issues. The system just doesn't feel like I would have expected it to, its slow on games that it really shouldn't be (Tropico 4, Civ 5). When tested while playing, the gpu is maxed out all of the time on lowest graphics, and even right now it has a 20% load.

Through some research I've come to two conclusions, either the gpu is bad, or the issue pertains to the hard drive/os. I bought all new hardware, bar a hard drive that came out of a dell studio xps. The drive has bad sectors, but is able to boot okay. Installed on the drive is a copy of windows xp media center edition 32 bit. The hard drive is now making an almost constant clicking noise. Could the hard drive be slowing the gpu, also could the 32 bit os not be compatible with the 64 bit cpu?

I apologize for the rambling/wall of text, its late and I'm getting frustrated. :fou: 

System Specs
----------------------------
AMD FX-8120 AM3+ Eight-Core
GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 Rev 1.1
8 Gbs Ripjaw X RAM (I realize only 4 Gbs are usable)
600 Watt PSU
EVGA GTX 550 Ti (Fermi) 1GB 192-bit GDDR5 Video Card
-----------------------------

Thanks in advance,
Zabot

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Graphics card Authority

Then it's the HDD that is going to fail soon, it's best to get a new one. That is most likely the reason for sloppy performance. After you change to a good HDD, if it continues to give you the same issues, then it may be the GPU. For now, I suspect the HDD is giving you your current issues.
Graphics card Authority

Until you try it with a good working HDD, it could be the HDD that is giving you the headaches. It's like changing a transmission in a car but the engine is still blown.

If you are still having issues with a working HDD, then it could be the GPU.
Graphics card Authority

If you can afford one, I would opt for a SSD (Solid State Drive) as they are both faster in read and write operations meaning games would load much quicker than a HDD.

I have a Crucial M4 256GB SSD and has been wonderful ever since I replaced an aging WD Rapter HDD.

Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital make good HDD's.

It would depend on the storage space and your budget to give you a solid answer.

I would say that using 32bit operating system can be really bottle neck because it can not support more than 3+1 Gigabytes of ram and many features of CPU are totally wasted.

So basically, I would advice to get 64bit OS ad seeing after that, if you keep having performance issues.
Graphics card Authority

I would usually suggest to getting new HDD's/SSD's to have less issues. You can try it with those older IDE ones. Just make sure they are at least 7200 RPM. Also getting a 64 bit OS would help make the most of your RAM and CPU.

Alright thanks, I want an ssd with windows 7, but I just don't have the cash. I'm gonna go out tomorrow to look for hard drive, I can update then.
Thanks again.
Graphics card Authority

You're welcome, report back when you get a new HDD. Windows 7 is a nice upgrade from XP as you will be able to utilize DX 11 as XP goes to DX 9.0c only. ;) 
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