New build with Wolfdale & 8800GTS. barely runs medium settings Crysis

I just built my first system and downloaded the Crysis demo last night.
Here are the specs:

Antec earthwatts 500watts PSU
gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
E8400 @ 3GHz
2x 1gb 667MHz dual channel
8800GTS 320mb
250GB SATA hd
vista 32bit

I can run Crysis on medium settings. Even at 1024x768 on high, it gets really choppy. What is bottlenecking me? I have all the windows updates. Is my graphics card a piece of crap or is it because the copy of the demo I have has sloppy code? It does say "PRERELEASE DEMO" on the top right hand corner during the whole game.

I know I should have gotten the 512mb gts. I didn't have a choice though. It was a birthday present from my girlfriend. She just knew I wanted the 8800 card. She said she called dell, and they were out of the GT, so she got me the GTS they had instead and she thought it was better because it was priced higher. I asked her how much it cost her. She paid $270 for it!!! It is evga and I can step up to the 8800GT for FREE because it costs less than what she paid dell for the 320mb gts. We still have to pay shipping and handling. So should I do that or buy the game and hope the full version is more optimized with the patches and stuff then the pre-release demo?

8800gts 320 only does medium with acceptable fps (30+), I got the same card. I have the game, latest patch and drivers, hardly a difference, got some settings on very high (physics, sound and post processing, but motion blur is OFF).

The 320 is old, there's a new GTS (512) which is way better, but you can also get an 8800GT for around (or less) the same price as your GTS 320. If you can stepup to a GTS 512 I don't think you'd be disappointed (if the price is reasonable).

Your system is outstanding, but that videocard should have been taken off everyone's shelves and buried. For the price, it is a total rip-off. The 8800gt or the 8800gts (G92) 512 will really smarten that system up.

Also, if you are running DX10 on vista, well... You can't be helped. Two 8800 ultras in SLI won't give you good performance for DX10 on High.

Is it possible to run DX9 on Vista? Do that, and watch your performance rise.

Even though the old G80 GTS is outperformed and overpriced, it still should handle Crysis fine at that res. I've got the 640MB version and it played 1280x1024 through the entire game without a problem.

I'm inclined to believe that it is Vista or possible DX10 that is leaching performance.

To verify, I'd download some benchmarking tool and see what you score. You should be 9-11k with that setup. You can also download Process Explorer from Sysinterals and make sure you don't have a ton of Hardware Interupts and DPC's eating up your CPU time.

You let your girlfriend buy you PC hardware?! I typically find that friends / family / girlfriends etc. don't know squat about buying computer stuff. My mother bought a printer back in the day for her Windows 95 PC, and was wondering why it wasn't working. Then I look on the side of the printer and it says "Compatible with Windows 98 and up" LOLZ

Anyway, back to your problem. You have 2 options to increase your performance: first off you can try to get the 8800 GTS (G92) like everyone else suggested. It's the newest GTS model and it's very fast compared to the older versions (it can keep up with the GTX). Second, you can upgrade your RAM and bump yourself up to 4GB (it's cheap, why not?) if you do both of those things you should be straight.

PS I also see you're playing the demo version of Crysis. The full retail version of Crysis has a patch out that improves performance. That could also be a factor.