I bought a new computer with super fast peices recently:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Dual Core Processor with upgraded Thermaltake Big Typhoon Cooling Fan with Heatsink — DFI nF4-DAGF Mobo — XFX Geforce 6600GT 128MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card with upgraded ZALMAN Heatsink Fan — 2GB of G.SKILL DDR400 RAM — Huge Acer Black 20″ Widescreen LCD Monitor — Black Coolmax Case — 2 - 80GB SATA drives — 2 - 250GB RAID 1 Storage drives

I bought it thinking it would be blazing fast for gaming. It can play CounterStrike Source very well… and thats about it. I cant get Battlefield 1942 to even load. Battlefield 2 demo can play pretty well. Games like Red Orchestra using the Unreal engine wont load either.

There are many fixes I have found online to attempt to solve the problems. I have installed an AMD dual core hotfix. I have installed the Win XP dual core hotfix. (Read about that here)

I have updated all my video card drivers (current version is Nvidia Forceware 81.98). I have also tried older versions (such as 77.72 that DFI suggests for the mobo and even older 5x.xx versions).

I have updated the Nvidia nForce system drivers (versions 6.66 and 6.70 - for sound/lan/RAID/IDE controllers on mobo).

I have run a memtest on my RAM with no errors. I have updated windows xp sp2. I have tried to update the registry to tell the Nvidia drivers to not use the second core. I have changed the affinity on the second core while trying to load the games. I have tried xp with only sp1 and without either service pack… all with no luck.

Programs other than games run super fast. Windows boots up almost within a blink of an eye. What is the deal? When I get back from my wedding and honeymoon, I have some ideas of what to swap out to see if the problem is fixed. Otherwise I am at a loss… Some peice of the computer does not want games to be played.