Problem with playing games on my computer

[findinggrace]

Alright,
well i've been looking all around for an answer to my problem but i havne't found anything
So i figured i'd just post it

When i play games on my computer (specs below) i get an odd Video problem
What happens is that during play the video appears to suddenly stop for like a quarter of a second (just enough for me to notice or even to mess me up)
I get this in all my games (Doom 3 and Tony Hawk Underground 2 are big ones to name)
It's extremely annoying and i feel like i've done everything i could think of
I know it's not the FPS (thats frames per second) is good because i have ATI Tray Tool showing the FPS on screen
I've adjusted the hell out of the PCI latency for the video card and otehr devices
I've defragged the computer
i cleaned up
I even ran a clean install to see if that would work
NOTHING!
as you can see from my specs i have a decent computer to play Doom 3 (and obviously THUG2)

Any thoughts?

my specs are:
ASUS A7N8X 2.0 Deluxe
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
ATI All in Wonder 9800 PRO
I use the NVIDIA SoundStorm to run my audio (and don't blame that thing...it's an awesome soundcard even when compared to Audigy 2)

 

[vegasgmc]

What your having is called "dropped frames". Its usually caused by a process or program running in the backgroud. I solved that problem by creating a seperate partition just for gaming. I have all the extra background crap turned off. I can play Half Life 2 at 1600x1200 and get an extra 200 points on 3Dmark 03.

 

[findinggrace]

actually, it appears that i didn't defrag the drive with the games on it
how silly of me
it "seems" the problem has went away
if it doesn't i'll post here again

EDIT

I have been thinking of doing that kind of thing with having my own partition
if i still get some problems i'll likely do that

 

[Tedster]

agree. Some games like domm 3 are very resource intensive. They suck all the processing power. Your CPU gets bogged down.

It will be interesting to see how the multi-die chips that are coming out will improve multi-tasking.

 

[findinggrace]

alright
so i created a seperate partition for gaming which has practically no background programs
it uses 112MB of RAM idle (compared to 190MB in the usual partition)
so that has to help a ton
but i still get dropped frames here and there (very minor though)
any ideas on what would speed up windows

i've shut off a ton of services and used TuneXP 1.5 to tune my computer already
and i defragged everything just in case
still i get a very minor problem
so ya
ideas would be wonderful

 

[vegasgmc]

How much system memory do you have? 512mb is the bare minimum Id go with but RAM is so cheap a gig will help alot. What resolutions are you playing at?
Are you using the latest motherboard drivers?

 

[findinggrace]

i have 1gig of Corsair TwinX memory
i have the latest Motherboard Bios
and i'm playing doom 3 at 800x600 at High Quality
also i have the Graphics Apature size in my bios to 512 (since AGP cards have direct access to RAM and i have fast RAM i didn't think this would slow things down)
as i said it's minor drops
and the only time i've really noticed it was in the beginning movie where the guys are looking outside and the ship comes by
others it's been just too minor to really tell