Have you updated your motherboard drivers? Have you tried the 460 in another pcie slot? Just ideas as from reading the posts above all the obvious bases have been covered.
Good point. He needs to check the PCIe is at x16 as well. An old motherboard I once had was running at x1 until I corrected it.
i only have 1 pcie x16 slot on my motherboard but as i said in a previous post i am getting a new mobo, processor and ram in the next few months. i am also going to try reinstalling cod
AMD is hilarious in the benchmarks, but it's a touch sketchy in reality. Stick with Intel. Download GPUz and post up the image of it, it might show that your clocks are a bit iffy or something. Double-check with something like MSI Afterburner that the GPU is running full speed, too. If it's dropping down to low-power 3D because of power issues; it would explain the issue.
HaHaHa I'm running a sempron 145 @ 3.2ghz single core along with hd 6870 almost see any frame rate drop's in some games compared with athlon ii x3 3.2 ghz ... Edit; I am not being sarcastic to your situation...
FYI bit of information (article getting old now but the main point still stands) about CPU bottlenecks. Article From Bit-tech testing Your phenom matches athlon dual cores in performance and showed some (but laughable) improvement over them in multithreaded tasks. My Athlon 6000+ is 3.1GHz and roughly equates to an intel core 2 @ 2.6GHz neglecting optimizations etc. Anandtech has a comparison of CPU's if you feel you want to work it out but it shouldn't change the results that much. There is no reason to be getting lower performance, With a faster card you should be able to increase resolution without getting any performance change at all unless the memory on the card is maxed. This would result in game performance falling off a cliff tho. My setup is similar (athlon 6000+ with a gtx260) and yes it is CPU limited, especially in New Vegas and crysis. In both games I get random drops in performance from buttery smooth to a little stutter especially in freeside/strip when there are multiple people or explosions with a swarm of aliens in crysis. Generally tho both games are playable with the occasional downward spike. TBH I wouldn't be surprised if the problem is the new card has a higher max and instead of sitting being GPU limited, with a small variation between min/max performance the extra headroom is creating a larger gap between min/max. IMO at large gap (even upward spikes with a nice average but moments of a very high fps achieved) is worse than running constantly @ 20fps.
.//TuNdRa had it right when he said to install MSI afterburner. It will show you the speed of your card then if you leave it running in the background when you play a game, it will tell you GPU usage. If it shows you that your GPU is not working flat out then it's time to open a can of worms.
