9600 not performing?

Umm...Pentium D 805?

its at 3.1 GHz

yeah PD=POS, unless u have it at like 5GHZ+ (not happening) its terrible. Buy a E5200 for like $72 and sell the PD (or make an awesome freebie on here) be done with it.

ur CPU is bottlenecking as these guys said above. i bought a sapphire x1650pro and was really excited, but then let down when i found my old Athlon XP was bottlenecking badly.

get the E5200 they recommended, mine is at 3.33ghz now and i run games at the 60FPS cap or in the range of 85-125fps when not capped.

It's bottlenecked for the 9600GT.

looks like prob solved, u have lots ahead of u. ur looking at a mobo/CPU upgrade. probably RAM too. i just went thru this same thing, i couldnt run games at more than 20fps when i realised i had my bottleneck.

a gigabyte LGA775 board is ~$100 and an E5200 is $72.

if u wanna go AMD, they are cheaper. board will be about the same as intel, but the CPUs are cheaper. the 7750 is a close competitor for my E5200 (but i OC'ed mine and can go up to 4.0ghz in most cases. the 7750 will hit a ceiling at 3.2-3.3ghz). but, its $52 at newegg i believe.

ram is ~$30 for 2gb of any decent brand.