Few question about my new graphics card Radeon 4870 x2.

Few days ago I bought the brand new ATI Radeon 4870 x2. The card is very good and all but just looking at the specs i thought its going to run games like crysis and Age of conan at about 40 - 50 fps with max setting. I ran crysis with full setting at resolution of 1680 x 1050 and the game runs at about 30 fps. Its a huge upgrade from my previous card but I was expecting a lot more from this card. Same with age of conan, it runs at about 30 fps too.

Im just wondering if there is something i need to do or change to make this card run at its full potential, I dont really know much about these stuff and its my first time ever using an ATI graphics card. Here is my current computer specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz
Sapphire ATI Radeon 4870 x2 (just a single card)
4GB RAM
Razer Barracuda Gaming sound card
20 inch Widescreen Acer Monitor

From my knowledge, I can say my computer is powerful enough to run a game like crysis at higher fps than 30, please help me out.

Thanks

Power supply?

Your CPU is bottlenecking the HD4870X2.Hannibp

Agree, it'll make use of a higher clock, an OC to about 3ghz migth fix this.

[QUOTE="Hannibp"]Your CPU is bottlenecking the HD4870X2.swehunt

Agree, it'll make use of a higher clock, an OC to about 3ghz migth fix this.

see this equation to solve teh problem (really made by me 4 my pc) :

OCZ Vendetta 2 + Arctic silver 5 + Q6600 = 3.4 GHz with below-stock temps

Power supply?

beefdog

I just picked up an X2 as well. I'm very impressed with how quiet it is (unless a game is configured wrong). It's a nice card. I like the Nvidia driver UI better but all in all, my PC is fun again (old one was slow).

Here's a few things I've figured out.

Catalyst AI tries to optimize games. In some games, it offers massive speed jumps. In other games, it causes slowdowns and issues. In yet other games, it can enable AA or image quality. I can't say it's a science, it seems to have a mind of its own. What I did instead of giving up on it, I created game profiles in the Catalyst Control Center. I fire up a game, hit the Windows key, open the ATI control panel and play with the image settings. When I find a setting that works well for me, I click apply and then click on Profiles -> Profile Manager. This opens the profiles manager window which will let you save your current settings. For any game that doesn't work with the defaults, I create a profile.

When I start a game, I right click on the ati tray icon and activate it Activate Profile -> ABC,XYZ. I don't like game profiles but this is actually easier than when I had an nvidia card. The ATI driver gives many more AA and image quality options so managing them with profiles is the best way to go (even if I felt lazy realizing this).

The biggest speed jump I've seen so far is enabling Catalyst AI (set to advanced) for WoW and HL2 engine games. For games like Spore, Catalyst AI seems to slow it down when set to advanced. Setting it to standard seems to enable AA (maybe spore is too new for the AI profiling). I dunno.

I'd also suggest, hitting newegg.com and checking customer reviews of your RAM. They might have posts about tight memory timings which can mitigate your CPU bottleneck. I found some good memory timings and voltages that have been perfectly reliable.