Hey guys.

I just got a cheap used computer to play old games like FarCry and Doom 3 on.

It has A Pentium 4 1.7Ghz, Radeon 9600 256MB And 1.25GB RAM.

I understand this isn't a great system at all but it should be able to play these games, I mean at least on medium settings. But I go to play Farcry and at 800x600 with medium settings the frame rate drops as low as 10 frames per second!!, On Doom 3 with low settings 640x480 it drops as low as 8 frames per second!

Surely there must be some sort of problem thats not hardware related?

Any help would be much appreciated.

nope,
A Radeon 9600 is ancient and was never really a gamer card anyway. My laptop which isn't a gaming laptop gets around those frames and it's using a crappy ATi 320m video card. I would give it up as a bad job.

lol, no, thats really old hardware and those games (although old, but not that old) stressed systems of their day and age.

A P4 1.7 is like a standard 2002 office PC and Radeon 9600 makes my X1600 PRO look like its on steroids

the 1.7ghz is fine, but that 9600 is not worth 2c

it really wouldn't cost much to get something like a 7600.... or even something less powerful....

Upgrade your graphics card. It should make a noticable improvement.

Overclock,overclock,overclock. Also optimize, ive never really liked having a really high end system that can run everything at max flawlessly. Part of the fun of owning a pc is you can always tweak things. if anything bite the bullet and go for a 6600Gt for around 25-30 bucks.

dOOd, don't overclock, that's not the problem. It's like everyone else says, you need a decent graphics card. That 9600 sucked even back when it was new. The 9800 Pro slayed the 9600....and that was YEARS ago.

Upgrade the gfx card

I played both of those games at 800x600 on medium settings on a Sapphire version of that card. The difference was, I had an AMD 2600+ with 1gb PC2700 ram, and was running Windows XP SP1. If you have XP SP2, it really slows an old machine down. After running it for a week or so, I wiped the HD and reinstalled SP1, and turned off the update feature.

get the x1600 pro for those games. I'm running it and an overclocked sempron 2600, and I get between 30 and 60 on doom3 800x600 and around 40 on half life 2.