video card issues for A7N8X-E Deluxe?

[psychrome86]

Hello all, I find myself here while trying to solve some graphics issues.

SHORT STORY
I've got an Athlon XP 3200+ with 3gb Corsair ram (mem86 passed them all) and a recently purchased Radeon x1950. My graphics are real choppy and I was wondering if maybe I went overboard on the card and should get a lesser one. I was thinking a radeon x700-x850. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.


LONG STORY
For years I had the board with a 1.2ghz Duron and 512mb of ram coupled with a radeon 9200. That combo worked well for me until I encountered half-life 2. I played it through on very low settings and had a lot of fun. Recently I went back to it and decided to max out the board to get the best settings possible. First I bought a Radeon x1950 512mb card. I thought because it was so powerful I could really clean up. Well graphics actually got choppy. I went ahead and bought 3GB of corsair RAM and an XP-M. I played around with the XP-M for a long time and managed to overclock it 2.5ghz. HL2 started crashing at the opening sequence after 1.8ghz, though. I thought the CPU might be faulty so I bought an XP 3200+ for a stable 2.2ghz. I still had the same problem. HL2 crashed with any CPU speed higher than 1.8ghz, even on low settings. At one point I realized I had never put the nforce2 drivers on the computer from the last reformatting. That made it run with the higher speeds finally but it's still getting choppy. I've been looking around the net and I see things here and there about video cards might be too powerful for their CPUs. Is that what I might be up against? I've tested the memory with mem86 and they all came out fine. So I'm thinking I should get a lesser video card. Maybe the radeon x700-x850? Any advice is very appreciated. Thanks.

[wonkanoby]

whats powering this in detail

[wonkanoby]

(mem86 passed them all)

was this one by one or all 3 at same time

[psychrome86]

I had all three sticks in when I ran the test. Should I do it again one by one? the power supply is a 500W cooler master I picked up on the cheap. I had thought about maybe getting a 700W antec but I don't want to go spend more money when I might not need it.

[wonkanoby]

no if it passes with 3 should be fine

dont rate antec as psu makers at all any more

corsair with a single 12v rail is my recommendation

got a mate can loan you a descent psu to try

[Gilly]

this may sound like a stupid sugestion but have you installed the drivers again for the x1900 card? its not exactly easy to forget the ones for the chipset so i wonder if you perhaps overlooked the graphics card ones this time

[psychrome86]

The graphics card drivers are up to date. All I can really think of is the card is just giving the processor too much info at once, or the power supply is just not powerful enough. Another thing I wonder is should I even be using an ATI card on this board or this that nothing to worry about?

No on antec eh? Any other brands I should look into besides corsair?

thanks for the help so far people.