Upgrade with little to no change-- bottleneck?

[cusideabelincoln]

A 2GB video card with a 32-bit OS means you have less than 2GB of available system RAM for the OS - should be around 1.8GB. That is not ideal.

Here some things I think you should test:

Get MSI Afterburner and have it monitor your clock speeds and GPU usage while you game. Also have the Task Manager opened so you can look at CPU usage. Play games for a bit, and when you exit the games see what the graphs look like.

Also concerning your CPU overclock you also want to make sure your Northbridge is overclocked too.

Right now I have the processor OC'd to 3.2 GHz, and it's running stable, but it showed no framerate improvement.

You should see gains from overclocking if your are CPU bottlenecked.

 

[BD231]

overkill for many games yes but it will also depend on what card and settings someone is usuing. a 5870 is quite a bit faster than your gtx460 and 1680 is not exactly high res so he should at least oc his current cpu a bit for those more cpu intensive games.

I'm at 875 core which leaves me neck and neck with his card at stock clocks last I checked. nVidia gpu's also have a higher CPU overhead so his cpu should be even less of an issue using ATI. Phenom II's are fast gaming CPU's, but only fail to add up in CPU bound games.

Only well documented lack of CPU power in games such as War Craft does his CPU stand to be an issue and an X6 CPU would have the exact same limitation. It's the same cpu.

Move to windows seven 64bit, it probably has better driver support than XP by now and you'll be able to use ALL of your system memory.

 

[blanketyblank]

Check that your card is running at 16x or at least 8x. I saw people had problems where there card was somehow running at 1x or 4x after upgrading. Had to flash their mobo bios or change a setting like that to get it running correctly.