fast pc but games lag.. please read

[weeks]

Hey.

Lets start with this.

I have an asus p5p800-vm mobo, a pentium d 2.6ghz (i know the d isnt the best but whatever), 2gb of ram, a creative sound blaster audigy se, 1x80gb sata 7200 rpm hdd, 1x200gb 7200 rpm sata II hdd, 1x250gb sata II 7200rpm hdd, and a saphire radeon x1650 pro with 512mb ddr3, sony dvd player, and lg burner.

Not a horrible pc to my standards.

Now WoW runs fine (my subscription is running up and im bored of it anyway), and genereally speaking prey runs fine. Now Wow never used to run. Basicaly everygame except prey the videos played fine, liek everythign worked except when I went to play games its like i had a sticky keyboard all my commands would lag to **** but the mouse was fine, video was smooth etc. So i formatted and the same problem was there. I bought a new copy of windows xp pro and it has ALL of the updates on it, and everything. Then WoW worked fine and prey would run a bit better, I also noticed a slight increase in pc performance.

Now except for the above two games all the video lags, like its really choppy (even on lowest settings), and I have updated all the drivers. I have had this problem for months and its driving me crazy as I have soem games I woudl liek to play and I cant figure this out.

The games Ive tested that lag (liek my computer is too ****ty to play them): cs source, half life 2, half life 2 deathmatch, half life 2 lost coast, prey, wow, pariah, tomb raider legend, tomb raider anniversary (which i want to play so much), far cry, and the open source cube games.

Wide variety and my pc surpasses the minimum reqs. Please please please this is driving me crazy im usually pretty good with pcs but this... AGHHH! I need this to work properly, ive returned my video card (RMA replacement) and everything. I cant think of anything else. I also do not have the money right now to buy anythign new. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE help.

Thank you.

P.S. sorry for the spelling but when i type fast it happens... OH! and i had also bought a new keyboard.

 

[LinkedKube]

Ok, so you did some hardware check, you have multiple hard drives, which one is the os on? I see that you reformatted, did you try putting stuff on another HD, if you have multiple items/programs pulling from all these drives at the same time, it could cause some issues, did you think about that? Obviously its not your vga, and I high doubt its the keyboard, lol.

 

[Grafficks]

Since you just reformatted and reinstalled the OS, I doubt you will have lingering malware (if there was any to begin with). Some things you can try:

Try a crap-ware cleaner, especially C-Cleaner. This will clear some useless junk.

Run your Windows Disk Defragmenter on your OS drive <-- *this can dramatically improve speed.

Keep modern games on medium settings.


Even if you PC's specs surpass the minimum requirements, it does not mean you can play it on max. The minimum game requirements are generated by finding the lowest possible hardware components that will run the game. Since the Radeon x1650 is a Mid-range graphics card, you can expect to play most games at medium settings.

 

[weeks]

I have defragged it, i use c-cleaner, spybot, and ad-aware alot, my os is on the 250gb hdd and i use the others as storage.

In the background i use windowsblinds, logonxp, objectdock, and rainlendar.

I have the games on low settings.

I have no clue what to do here.

Also could it possibly be the pentium D cpu or maybe the mobo?