stumped

have an issue with my games
I have an athlon x2 64 6000+
2.5 gig ddr2 @800mhz
sata2 hdd with 16 meg cash
geforce 8600gt ddr3 512

and UT3 and Crysis are laggy even with the vid settings as low as they can be.
How can I find out whats slowing me down?

 

Is this a new system or one you've been using for some time? Did you build it yourself? My first thoughts would be to check and see if there's an update for your motherboard's BIOS and also check to make sure you have newer drivers for your graphics and sound cards. But make sure you save a copy of your older drivers in case something gets screwed up with newer drivers. Demanding games often improve if you update your mobo's BIOS and graphics card drivers (and sometimes, though less often, your sound card drivers also). But sometimes on some systems a BIOS update may go awry, so make sure you know how to reset your CMOS/BIOS if something goes wrong and/or know how to backup your older version of the BIOS before attempting to flash the update to the CMOS chip. That way you can easily restore your BIOS if you need to. Similarly, newer graphics card drivers can make a substantial improvement in frame rates and responsiveness for newer games, but sometimes these newer drivers can make things even worse on some particular combinations of hardware.

If you've already tried these possible fixes, post back and tell us that and maybe someone else will have additional suggestions you can try.

 

Still no luck?