A little background:
CPU: AMD Phenom 9600 @ 2.3ghz
RAM: 4GB Kingston? 1066 memory.
GPU: ATI HD5870
Motherboard: Asus M3A78-CM.
Previously I had the same setup with an ATI HD 4850, and I was ALWAYS disappointed with my performance when gaming. When I was playing Crysis(for example) I would be running around in a plain area with no dense foliage or extra character models on the screen the game would run flawlessly, 80+ FPS. As soon as the card had anything more to process it would instantly drop to under 10 FPS. It has done this on every game or benchmark I have thrown at it and it's killing me.
I recently purchased a new ATI HD5870 card and I am having the exact same performance as with my 4850. Same problems same FPS etc.
I recently noticed that my PCIe slot that should be running @ x16 is only running at x1, and I would assume has been since day 1.
I have tried and tried to scour forums and good old google to no avail. I can't seem to find any fix for this.
Has anyone heard of or experienced anything similar that they may know a fix for?
My 3DMark Vantage score was a low low 7500, with the old 4850 it was about 7300, if that means anything to anyone!
(I posted this in the main GFX Card forum on accident, my apologies for the double post)