[SOLVED] Upgraded video... PC's performance still sucks

I'll just respond to this with a photo of the back of my Nissan:

That's classic! I used to be married and is THAT the truth or what?!!

Core's wife's reaction to new motherboard and / or build:

Her money is hers and HIS money is hers!

I know that feeling all too well, 22 years of experience at it.

I get the same thing but the opposite direction...my money is ours and his money is his. :/

Hmmm... an enigma wrapped in a paradox!

Nibiru asked about this in another thread and so I remembered I hadn't updated this. I ended up trying several different memory sticks and running both the POST memory test and memtest86+. After a lot of trial and error I've found that the 2GB in the first slot is the most reliable...I'm not sure what's up, might be that the second slot has problems or that the motherboard in general does. I'm guessing the mobo is less than reliable.

Switching the 40-conductor to an 80 has made a difference. I used HDTune to benchmark the hard drives before and after the switch, and found that the large 250 gig drive is almost twice as fast as the others, if read tests (went from 30 MB/s to 59) are any indication, so it hosts the system now.

I have Win7 humming on it and it's working fine so far. Memory tests have passed. Zero-fill format cleared bad sectors from the hard drive. I'll do another series of diagnostics after I'm done moving all the data back and forth.

The capacitors don't look bloated, but it's a good tip. The board was manufactured in 2008.

I think all in all her machine is nearing the end of its life-cycle. Once I find work again and can afford to incrementally invest in some hardware I'm probably going to build a custom rig for myself and pass on my triple-core to her.

Probably won't be doing anymore folding on her machine, at any rate.

Thank you, everyone, for your info, advice, and input.

The machine being only two years old should have several years of life left in it.

I wish you luck in finding employment, it's tough out there these days.