Irecently purchased and upgraded a new pc. specs.

vista home
intel core2quad 6600 2.4ghz
3gb ram
dual 350 gb hard drives 720rpm
nvidia geforce 8600gs 512mb

What im wondering is? This card doesnt seem to run very well. The performance on my games is dismal. In particulat Kane and Lynch which will run on minimum settings but skip and pause every 2 seconds. Is there any thing i can do or just get a new card?

Cheers

Hi Core-2-Davor, welcome to PCHF.

Check you main graphics settings, you may have quality set over performance. Right click on your desktop, and click on Properties, Settings tab, Advanced, and then click on the top right tab (NVidia Geforce 8600gs). Select "Classic View" if prompted. Depending on the your driver version, your settings will look something like:



Click on Performance and Quality to the left, followed by Image Settings shown in the list above. You will then see a slider which you can use to lower your quality settings, and move it towards performance instead.

Also make sure you have the latest NVidia drivers from here: Drivers - NVIDIA Driver Downloads - Download Drivers

As for the hardware itself, it looks like you may have gone for the cheapest 8600 you could get with the most memory. The GS's are not as good as the GT's, and when choosing a card, clock speed is always more important than memory.

Thanks. I have all settings at a minimum, game and nvidia controller. But its still jumps alot. i think it might be a ram problem because the game runs brilliant for four seconds between these kind of 'pauses'. Its not like the fps are low or anything its not that constant its more periodic. And it occurs in the game menu too, which is weird i thought, like why would the menu do the same thing? Nothings happening! What u think.

I've not played Kane and Lynch myself, so not sure how graphically intesive this menu is, but I do know you meet the minimum and recommended requirements. You only just meet the recommended spec for CPU, as you have a quad core which is not much use in the gaming world unless your running Vista, and even then, then game must be designed to utilize it.

Even so, you should have absolutely no problems running that game on minimum, or even medium graphic settings with those spec's. One thing I would check then, is that your not overheating. When the GPU reaches a certain temperature, it's "throttles back", and reduces it's clock speed to keep the GPU under it's threshold temperature.

Use NTune to check your GPU Temperature: NVIDIA nTune
And use speedfan to check the rest of the temperatures in your PC: SpeedFan - Access temperature sensor in your computer

EDIT: Marked as Answered.