This is some useful, clear info. Makes it easier to see where I should go from here. Cheers man! 

i think what stops me from upgrading all the time (my machine is almost 6 years old!) is having to relearn all the hardware stuff every time.
most of ricky's post i'd never heard before, and i've been building my own machines for like almost 15 years now. 

Yeah it is a pain having to learn and research what all the latest best hardware is. It changes so fast.

I think the 6970 Radeon is only slightly more expensive? Get a 120gb SSD if you can, then all your programs can go on there too. There's some cheaper brands out there.

And get 600w power supply. 

I switched to a 600w PSU, changed the chipset to a P67, grabbed an i5 2500K and picked out a 60GB SSD. I already went over my intended budget so I didn't want to spend too much over that which is why I stuck with a 6950, but I think this should be worth it. Already have a 2TB HDD which I can now use primarily for games (partitioned for XP & Steam atm) Ordered it all and everything besides the fan has been dispatched. Hope they have a fan instock or I'll have to try elsewhere.

Cheers for all the help guys. 

the 6950 overclocks like a dream, too. And crossfire isgenerally like 90-100% or some shit man, srsly 

It's pretty similar to my system quakis - 8gb ram, p67, 2500k. Except I got 120gb SSD, 700w power, and GTX 560 which I wouldn't recommend - out of the box it had issues which weren't resolved until I underclocked it. I didn't get any extra fans or cooling for it though.

Make sure you get 64bit win7. 

right, this may not be the 100% most correct thread to post this in, but i put it here under the suspicion that the solution may involve some kind of hardware upgrade...

basically on HL2/portal and doom 3 (so two completely different engines) i've been getting extremely annoying bouts of slowdown, where framerate plummets to something like 3-4 fps, for periods of 30-60 seconds. this happens regularly every 5-10 mins or so, regardless of the type of area i'm in, and continues even when i escape to the menu and move the mouse around. after a while it just snaps back to normal speed as if nothing happened

now my comp isn't exactly great, but it was decent enough in 2008 when i bought it and i managed HL2, both episodes & portal back then without a hitch, but now it isn't having any of it, despite me not making any hardware changes since then.

i'm wondering if something could be knackered... gfx card, memory, cpu.. but thought i'd throw the problem out here to see if anyone's heard of it before and might be able to narrow down the possible causes! 

could be a heat issue? If something is overheating it will throttle itself (cpu,gfx card) in order to not explode :) Check your fans etc to see if they are spinning freely.

If its not that, then perhaps a rogue process in windows that routinely hogs the cpu for something every few minutes, could by spyware or a legit program, keep an eye on task manager while the game is running and see if any other apps sudden rise to 100% cpu usage. 

Does it do it for newer games? HL2 and D3 shouldn't be that graphic intensive. My first guess would be check it's not overheating. Get a little program that checks temperatures. 

Cleaned out all that dust? You'd be surprised at how much of an improvement that makes, all that stuff clogging up the heatsink/fans and any vents. Can really turn up the heat. Otherwise, just ignore me.

Few years back, this never occured to me for some reason and upon actually checking and doing a thorough clean made a huge difference.

'tis the only suggestion I have. 

No idear - but are you using up-to-date drivers? 

i don't have anything newer than those kona, save for portal 2 (which is basically HL2 from a technical point of view) ..yeah i'm a little behind the times ;)

temperature app seems a good idea, i shall obtain. gave the fans a bit of a dust too :D

right now i'm testing it from a different system HD. hopefully that will help determine whether it's a software or hardware thing... 

Released today.

Fuck me, it's a fast graphics card. 

not sure where to post, so i'm posting here . i'm looking for a decent player for win7. winamp 5something sounds like shit or i can't properly configure it. So maybe i should move to another player. Any advice?
2.95 was great for XP 

The GUI looks like shit (underdone, looks like 'generic windows XP' kinda), but I would highly recommend it. It has a lot of features and plays almost anything. And the sound quality is superior to Windows Media Player, I can guarantee that. Winamp never seemed too bad to me, but VLC sounds better for sure. I'm using some cheap 40watt desktop studio monitors, and I can really tell the difference between VLC and Media Player for sure. 

www.videolan.org/vlc/ 

don't listen to Ricky. get foobar. 

It's good, been using it for years.

No bullshit media player. 

but to be honest, if a media player sounds bad to you then there probably is something terribly wrong with your system or player config. 

gonna check that.

but to be honest, if a media player sounds bad to you then there probably is something terribly wrong with your system or player config.

i have two OS on my PC , win7 and XP. and on XP the sound from winamp 2.95 much better and richer. in seven i'm using winamp5 as i cant launch 2.95 for seven 

okay, so portal 2 worked absolutely fine when i tried it on a different HD containing a fresh windows install (albeit a service pack & numerous updates behind) and i got a good day or two playtime out of it before i had to go away for christmas. however on returning and loading it back up i find the problem has resurfaced, only worse this time since it doesn't snap out of the slowdown unless i close the game and restart (and it kicks in after less than 5 minutes now)

drivers have been updated, temperature monitor has been installed (cpu is running a good 10 degrees below apparent average) and task manager shows nothing untoward. but it was actually working! then it wasn't! i can only assume an xp automatic update broke it? :(

something is obviously fucked. tempted just to thwack a load out on a new machine but that means no summer holiday next year!! 

http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/21/origin-pc-launches-new-3d-gaming-laptop-two-graphics-cards-for/

I am just wondering what would be the result with Quake :> 

i should put everything into perspective first, though:

graphics cards:

i don't mind fps going below 50. obviously anything below 10-15 is unplayable.
the current graphics card in my mac is an nvidia geforce 6600.

a friend said the below specs are a good start for me:

'intel core 2 duo' is better than processors marked as 'intel dual core' or 'intel core duo' (although they do exactly the same thing 'intel core 2 duo' is the most recent and generally better). aim for one that is at least 2.2 ghz (games like stalker need processors of this speed or above to run smoothly)

windows xp is generally better for gaming although there are games appearing that will only run on vista/windows 7

2 gb of ram is perfectly sufficient for almost all games.

i'm all ears! 

But that mostly sounds like advice from about 4 years ago. Current intel tech is sandybridge which I think gets sold under names like "second generation core i7" and is at least two generations on from the core 2 duo. The intel GPU that can accompany sandybridge chips actually has decent performance for an integrated gpu, but you'd want something gruntier for games I'm sure.

I don't understand any reason for limiting yourself to 2 gigs of RAM. I have 8 gigs in my laptop which would cost me all of US$45 currently.

Can't comment on vista vs xp vs windows 7, but have heard that windows 7 is actually reasonably nice...