Hey hows it going, firstly ill give you my specs

Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q9550 2.8
3gb of ram
Nvidia Geforce GTX 295
Windows XP

With this i believed i would get a fair amount of performance from my computer, and to be honest it just seems like something is limiting it and i have no idea what.

I have no chance of running a game like Crysis or Empire total war(even world of warcraft, in certain areas) with all the options on max, and expect it to run at a "playable" speed.

All my drivers seem to be up-to-date, so i doubt it would be a driver problem.

Is my computer meant to be struggling with theses games? for example on Empire total war with everything maxed (even if i change the unit size to normal) i end up at around 10-15 FPS.

Any help you guys can give me is very appreciated i have no idea whats going on .The only thing i can think of is my OS, or my lack of space( i have a 150gb hard drive with about 20gigs of free space)

Cheers

Are you saying that the games are laggy on High settings or that they even lag on normal/low settings?

My first question would be how much Memory does your video card have?

I don't think the OS is the problem. XP is probably the leanest OS (in terms of memory usage and graphical requirements) and IMO the best for many things, including gaming.

20GB of space is a little low although I think most games only require 5GB of free space...but I'm not sure about that.

If you have a lot of large files on the drive then you may benefit from running the Disk Defragmenter

Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter

Although it probably won't improve your gaming experience that much.

The bottom line is if your computer can't play a game on a certain setting then you will have to use a lower setting. Just because a setting (eg High Ultra High is there doesn't mean it should or could be used)

With games like Empire total war its pretty much all laggy, not just on high settings, it only becomes reasonably smooth when i pretty much put everything on the bare minimum.

My video card has 1792 MB of mem.

so i don't really know whats going on here, im just taking a guess but i have been thinking my quad core might not be working fully or properly, by that i mean when i upgraded from my dual core i didn't really notice any notable difference.

Could it be possible that it is only using 1 or 2 cores? when i go into the task manager to see, it says that all 4 cores are being used on that program.Would there be anyway to test if its a processor problem?

For your processor this may help:

CPUID

There is also the possibility that you have a bad graphics card. Use this to check the temperature of your card:

http://www.almico.com/speedfan439.exe

Anything above 55C or so suggests that your card is running hot. Although lots of cards do run fine at high temperatures.

Video card seems likely to be the problem. You have more than enough memory.

I suppose one other possible cause is that you have a lot of processes running on your machine which are hogging the system memory.

To check what is running press Ctrl + Alt + Del and go to the Processes tab. Anything above 50 is probably high.

Also check that you don't have a lot of other programs such as antivirus, firewalls etc running since they use up memory too.

well i myself have had a powerful pc system, but one that seemed to lag rather a lot, bear in mind that windows xp will only support so much memory, but it still should run perfectly fine. i suspect that something like norton 360, or kapersky could cause this problem, it eats a LOT of system resources. to optimise the performance of your pc, i can recommend a few pieces of software: malwarebytes' anti malware, ccleaner, defraggler, however, for the amount of lag you seem to be experiencing, This doesn't seem logical, and may not make much difference. you may want to try also updating your directX, if possible, disabling, or lowering the bar for hardware acceleration for your graphics card, the graphics won't be QUITE as good, but it will help your pc run smoothly whilst running a game, :/ hope this goes some way to helping the problem