$2,000 Custom Computer I Built is WORSE Than My $400 Store Bought Computer?

Question

I spent around $2,000 on my custom gaming computer I just built. It has an EVGA GTx 275 Super clocked, an Intel i7 920, 850 Watt Power Supply, 30 GB OCZ SSD Boot Drive, 1 TB ATA SATA Hard Drive, and 6 GB DDR3-1600 RAM. When I play Crysis or Grand Theft Auto 4, it lags up a storm on LOW quality. I am really freaking out here. I installed all of the drivers for the video card, and up to date from nvidia's website. My $400 Storebought Gateway DX has better performance in Crysis and GTA IV. I added an EVGA GeForce 9500GT in it, but it only has a 2.5 GHz Intel Core Duo, and 4 GB RAM. WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON!?!?!

Answer 1

It really sounds like a driver issue to me. Could be motherboard, GPU or sound related. Go back one driver revision on each device, one at a time. Test it after every change. You can try disabling the sound device in device manager and see if performance improves. I've seen sound drivers that cause this. And for sake of being sure, download Memtest86 and run it to test the RAM, just because all 6 gigs show up doesn't mean its functioning properly.

Answer 2

It sounds like you have either a driver problem, or processes running in the background using up your system resources. Uninstall your video card, restart and reinstall the latest driver for your card.

After that if you still have problems, check out Task Manager and see how many processes are running and what you CPU utilization is at idle. You may have your antivirus scanning in the background or an indexing service accessing your hard drive.

Turning off unnecessary processes and programs running in the background may speed up your gaming.

Answer 3

Did you also install your mobo drivers and then update them.? Is your system 32 bit or 64 bit? It will only work with less then 4Gb ram if it is 32 bit. How is your ram set up, manually or automatic.?



Maybe you have a bad stick of ram, it happened to me. I bought two sticks of 2Gb each and one of them was bad, but I couldn't tell. My machine acted up, hard starting, freezing, etc., So I downloaded a memory card tester and I found one stick to be bad.



But it sound to me that your video is still not right. Did you change it in bios to read the card, or is that automatic.?

Answer 4

Try DriverCure http://bit.ly/4nbOIm to detect the correct Drivers you need for you system. You seem to be having a problem with conflicting drivers. Also try disabling the onboard video in the BIOS

Answer 5

This is what happens when you don't know what are you doing and you just picking the most expensive hardware in each category. I have build computers for under $300 that are flying.

Answer 6

Bummer dude!