Wow... looked up specs for 9800... it's gonna be a damn great card... but even the cheaper $400 one is quite out of my price range haha. Though... I guess I could just sell something else I own to cover that cost...

But I don't think I'm going to look into a 9800 any time soon... I've only got a 550w power supply... or was it 500? don't remember.

Though mebe I can use that... step up program they have? So confused! ARGH! you made my binary decision into a trinary one!

Wait for the 29 of oct and grab a 8800GT. It will cost $150-250 and outperform the 8800gts 320.wklzip

whoa seriously? more info please!

Also, jtim6007, what's ur avg. fps for CoD4? I ran a real benchmark and mine only goes @ 20fps XD

I also thank all you others for your responses.

All right, I've got a fairly sweet rig set up:

Intel Core 2 Duo e6600 @ 2.8ghz (overclocked)

2gb DDR2 PC6400 A-DATA (5-5-5-18)

300gb 7200rpm HDD (SATA)

Asus P5N-E SLI Motherboard

BFG Geforce 7950GT OC 512mb PCI-E

Antec 900 Case

Now... I have an opportunity to upgrade to the Geforce 8800GTS 320mb Superclocked edition... But I'm wondering if paying roughly $100 more is warranted. Now I know the 8800 is a force to be reckoned with, but if the one I'm planning on buying isn't that much better than the 7950 I've got now, I don't see why I should upgrade. The only reason I wanna upgrade is so that I can play games without worrying about choking or low FPS. My 7950 has been great, but newer games aren't fairing too well (Call of Duty 4 Demo, for instance). CoD4 demo runs at 1024x768 everything maxed out on an average of 30FPS (but it's pretty laggy to me). This FPS will dip down to like 20 or 16 at times. The game is still very playable... but being a performance buff, I want much smoother gameplay =3

So... essentially I'm asking you folks if the upgrade to the 8800GTS is worth it.

Avg. FPSs @ very high or max settings:

Cod4 Demo - 30

Timeshift Demo - 30

BF2142 - 95

FEAR - 40

Guild Wars - 50

CnC3 Tiberium Wars - 30

Hitman Blood Money - 60

BF2 - 100

Team Fortress 2 - 30

Portal - 30

Half-Life 2 - 50

Sims 2 - 60

Bioshock - 25

Rainbow Six Vegas - 25

For any of you who still care about my issue:

I reinstalled winxp hoping that it was windows messing up my cpu readings. However, the reinstall didn't help. So I decided "what the hell" and overclocked my e6600 to 2.44ghz (stock is 2.4). Shockingly, this solved my problem!

Now everything seems fine and I've amped up the clock speed on my e6600 to 2.8ghz, which seems to be running stable (haven't had time to do a 12-hour stability test, but 2.5 hour one passed no problem). CPU stays well below 40c when idle and never goes above 55c.

Intel rox!

Anyway, thank all of you who invested time to try and help me out. Cheers.

Hi, recently purchased Intel Core 2 Duo Conroe E6600 and am loving the blazing fast performance of it. However, recently I noticed that all of a sudden one of my two cores is constantly running at 100% load. In other words, one of my two processors is always operating at maximum capacity. The other core functions normally (no load when idle and max load when running a game). These findings are backed by both SpeedFan 4.32 and Windows Task Manager (I'm running Windows XP SP2). According to SpeedFan, there are no adverse temperature increases (both cores remain below 50C when I'm idling).

So I am wondering whether or not I should be worried. I see no difference in computing speed or power and everything seems fine except that one of my cores is always running at full load.

Is this behavior normal or a result of a damaged processor?

Thanks for your help, guys.

1. Halo 3

2. Mass Effect

3. Assassin's Creed

4. Dark Sector

5. Unreal Tournament III

6. Army of Two

7. Battlefield: Bad Company

8. Grand Theft Auto IV

9. Dirt

10. Rainbow Six: Vegas sequel