Paranoia, tell me i'm not mad

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Ok, i've been having my suspisions for some time now about my system... even when i first got it it seemed a bit... slugish and not quite as good as it should be.

i upgraded from an MX440 to a 7900GTX and saw... little improvement in HL2

now, this is my system spec, same one as in my sig, what sort of 3Dmark06 scores should i be getting with it?

AMD Athlon X2 +4400 (overclocked to 2.33GHz)
2GB OCZ platnum DDR 500
nVidia 7900GTX (700 MHz) 512MB GDDR3
NF4 chipset
Windows XP home SP2

now my monitor is 1280 X 1024 nativ resolution but i have to play all my games on 1024 x 786 becayse they wont play smoothly

games such as HL2, HL2:E1 & 2, Doom 3, crysis.
now i know they're all grahically intensive but i'm having to play all of them with most of the visual effects turned off, on crysis i cant even play it without it looking like the original HL1 , i have to disable that many visual effects.
 
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I would think that your system should be capable of running the games you say at medium settings on native res. Something certainly seems amiss there. I know its not the fastest rig by todays standards but its hardly outdated. I wouldn't worry too much regarding crysis as its a bugged game that brings most of todays setups to its kness nevermind a setup thats 2yrs old.

Compare your 3dmark using the 'compare your system against similar systems' on orb.
 
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If i do find a problem, how can i go about troubleshooting it?

I've run programs like memtest, prime95 (on both cores) and on all stress tests, but i'm thinking it might be the 7900 card, is there any way to test that other then 3Dmark?
 
OcUK Systems
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power supply?

you will have reduced performance if your card isnt getting enough power, but it should give an error in the event log if this is happening

a very n00bie suggestion but useful none the less is SiSoft Sandra. You can benchmark the cpu, ram, hdd etc and compare it to known results but honestly these are unlikely to be the cause of your problems...

as for the card itself, 3Dmark is your best bet because you have a reference for your results...it's no use using a card specific stress test if you have no idea whether 30fps is brilliant or terrible for that test.
 
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Thanks scottiB, some sound advice there, i'll give sandra a blast anyway but i've run 3dMark06 now and got a score of 6254
SM2: 2739
SM3: 2646
CPU: 1784

ORB seems to think it's about average for the spec, middle between fastest and slowest so i'm going to just beat windows with a big digital stick untill all the corperatness falls out of it's registry to see if that speeds things up a bit.

I'm also going to try some custom settings with the nvidia control panel insted of letting applications decide the 'best' perforance.

one other thing, if i upgrade the coolers on my graphics card memory, think clocking it would help much?
 
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