Windows Gaming Performance Help Please!

Is there any tricks for me to get better performance in my games. I am trying to run Call of Duty 2, Quake 4, Doom 3, and F.E.A.R. They all work fine at medium settings but i want the most of the games. I want all high settings. I have ASROCK 939 Dual Sata2 motherboard, Athlon 64 3700+, 2 X 512 Corsair Extreme PC3200, and XFX Geforce 7300 GS.I have my pc OC'd to 2.74 Ghz, Ram at 197 Mhz, 2,3,2,5,1T,and 15t. and my graphics card at 574mhz core, and 571mhz memory. All running great. but performance at high settings suck bad. ESPECIALLY WITH AA. AA even at 2x run horrible. What can i do?? what is the difference between nvidia desktop OCing, and ATITOOL. ATITOOL says i have only 251mhz memory and 571 mhz core. Why is that too. I also read that 7300 GS runs at 550Mhz core and 800Mhz Memory STOCK, is this correct?? Please help me. Thanks.

 

Yea, it's cause you have a 7300. It doesnt matter what core speed or memory you make it have it just doesnt have the necessary grunt to do serious graphical work. Note the "3" behind the 7 means it has very few pixel and vertex shaders.
AA and serious graphical features have virtually nothing to do with the rest of the system, it's your graphics card that's bottlenecking it.

 

So there is actually some point to the rediculous names?

But yeah it seems it's you GFX card, a defrag and sort out of your HDD might help very slightly but wont mean you can bump up the settings or anything, just improve your load times a bit.

 

OK Thanks very much. As far as the ATITool thing why would it say my memory clock is at 250MHz ? and in NVidia Manager OC it's at 571Mhz?

 

Thats because ATItool is made for ATI cards. You shouldnt touch it if your running an nvidia card.

At least I dont think you should.

 

OK Thanks

 

What is the recommended Graphics card I should get for great performance and for little money?

 

No such thing mate. Wonder cards don't exist. You can get ok performance for ok money, great performance for great(as in large) money, or you can get rubbish performance for rubbish(as in hardly any) money. A very good value card for £/fps is the 7900GT right now, at least in the UK. It costs £200 in the UK, but only £150 or so from newegg in the states(that's about USD$290), so it's even better value over there. If you can afford that, great, if not, I'm not so sure whats below that thats worth getting. Someone else will be though.

 

How much is little money?

You want 7600 at least, X1800GTO, X800GTO/XL area. Perhaps some 7800 cards that are selling cheap now theyve been superceeded. You could even go for a 6800, if it's uber cheap.

 

A good bang-for-the-buck card (from experience building my roomates PC) is the 6600gt. You can get 2 6600-GTs, run them SLi for about the same price as a 7800GT. Granted, it won't be near as quick as anything higher then a 7800GT, but for the price it's pretty dang good

 

Two 6600GT's are actually really bad together. I saw some benching done, and the benefit of the second was tiny. It was nothing like(what was at the time mid-high range cards) 6800GT's in SLI. You were talking under 20% benefit sometimes. Now, since a 6600GT basicly costs you £100(just checked Scan), and a 7900GT can be had for about £210 if you look hard enough. I think the choice is easy