Right, well I built a newer rig recently and decided to fire up CS:Source as it had been a really long time since I last played. What do I find ? Thats right, my GFX card really seems to be struggling now but it didnt before :s

Ive gone from a XP3200 w/ 1gb ram to a Pent D @ 3.2 w/ 2gb ram. The GFX card is the same, an ATI X800XT PE.

I used to get a stable 50fps with Valves suggested settings but now I get massive fluxuations between 9 and 150fps ?!?! Ive tried switching all the OS based options and in game options off but it doesnt seem to make any difference.

Does anyone have any ideas ?

latest drivers from graphics?

are the mobo settings correct, for the graphics slot, etc

yeap and yeap.

I am coming to the conclusion that its either the card or a card/mobo combo as I am seeing drops to 50fps in CS1.6 too

Bah this old card has done me well I guess. Time to stop playing PC games and concentrate on the 360

How long ago?  You may find some more graphical options to tweak with since the major changes of the source engine and the introduction of HDR.  

You got a tv card or anything installed?

When Im playing a HDR map (de_dust) everything seems to be fine for a good 20mins or so. I get around 55fps with few drops.

As soon as 20mins passes or someone throws a smoke grenade somewhere on the map my FPS drops heavily and never recovers; even quitting and restarting doesnt recover the fps rate :/

Ive not got any other gfx device installed, except the onboard VGA. My BIOS option is set to AGP/Onboard, there is no "AGP Only" option so I guessed that would be best. There are other choicies; AGP/PCI, PCI/AGP, Onboard/AGP etc. I will try those too.

I was wondering if it was my resolution; 1280*1024 so I dropped that to 1024*768 but it made no difference !!

Wasnt there a software fix somewhere posted on here reasonably recently that solves issues with dual-core processors and wacky games performance?

If it wasnt on here Im convinced Ive seen that somewhere.

there was an amd dual core driver for games, dunno if intel have similar.