Games performance SLOW on high end pc

hey, first off my system specs are:

amd64 3500+ processor
1gb PC2100 ddr ram (2 x 512mb sticks)
120gb and 60gb hard drives
AGP nvidia gerforce 6800 (Leadtek A400 with all 16 vertex pipelines opened with no problems)
Asus A8V motherboard (not the delux version)

basically my pronlem is that games performace is slow, there is sumtimes lag. i have need for speed most wanted, so does my friend who has a sempron 3000+, 1gb ram and 6600GT, and his runs smoother than mine. could it be that he has 3 ram sticks running in dual channel mode. mine only run in single channel, i have tried all diferent slots, its probs because they are cheap makes.

basically is it my graphics card or my ram that is causing these slowdowns in games. because i know its not my processor.

also just did a Ram test in SIS Sandra, and i only got 1876MB/s. i'v seen such higher scores than that.

what am i doing wrong?

in 3dmark03 i get: 'with 16 pipelines enabled and 360/760 speeds': 10174, my cpu score is 622

there doesnt seem to be any REAL speed improvement over my old system, Pentium 4 2.66ghz and the rest o the components r the same (apart from motherboard). with my old system i got just over 9000 in 3dmark03.

in 3dmark05 i get about 3500

thanks

Jayesh

 

Did you install your motherboard drivers?
Did you install your graphics card drivers?

 

That PC2100 DDR is bottlenecking you all to hell.

 

Welcome to the forum Squeaner his 3dscores are right where they should be so he must have his mobo and vid card drivers installed ..

Looks like you have successfully unlocked your vid card,from your specs it really does look like your ram its like a huge bottle neck slowing down your whole system,ATM I'm running 2 sticks of corsair xms 3200 running in dual channel my memory bandwidth is 6.0 gb\s three times yours,to give you an idea how slow yours is my xp 1900 system\kt800 with one 512 stick of ddr 2700 scores 2.5gb\s a64's love high speed and heres the cruncher low latency memory,I'll also bet if you look on the memory the latencies 4 numbers will look something like this 4-4-4-9 just about the slowest you can buy

You have nothing to lose by buying 1gb 2 matching sticks of memory to run in dual channel consider corsair xms,kingston,OCZ,they MUST be a matched pair 2 x 512 sticks DONT buy 2 seperate 512 sticks because its cheaper,they also have lantencies of 2-2-2-5 if you want to make the most of your system