Hi Jon.It is difficult to tell, exactly, what best to use to benchmark your system, since there are so many combinations now days. The fact that you, personally knowing, made no changes, when you reinstall Mobo/Divers/OS, things WILL change, without being able to observe, when they reinstall, and you have to verify them. Video Drivers are notorious for causing problems, especially now that you run an .exe file and they will stack up without cleaning up. See details on this, and other boards, on how to Clean / Reinstall. With the right Driver you can do a good job, by installing in Safe Mode, after eliminating / deleting your Driver in the Device Manager, but it can be difficult at best. There are utils. out there that can help you get it done right. When you get a new Mobo, your Chipset Driver changes, and All other Drivers will be affected.Look for Nick's and Sam's posts on this board for more details, but I will give you a starting point.To start with get Prime95, CPUZ, CoreTemp, HDTune, LaMark, you have 3Dmark, run that last.Run HDTune, get a raw benchmark, you can compare it with others with similar systems, here, or on the Net, this gives you a good I/O, HDisk starting point.Start / Run / Execute CoreTemp, Run Prime95, make sure it setup for max load, Run CPUZ. This combo will give you info on the Temps, Clock rate (which may not be at max. set up when you first start your system, you may need to select Turbo etc.) and other info on your system, RAM, Video, Mobo etc. this is used to get info, not necessarily give you a benchmark / performance numbers, but you can analyze the numbers and get a good idea if you are running at max. performance capability of your system. Just take a pic. of these running, and post it here for more feedback.LaMark will give you some raw numbers on the performance that you can easily compare with others. All these are small utils. that you can download, and run in a short time. They are not the best, but they are efficient. If, and when, you get at this point you are still having questions, post here for more help. TV

Hi,Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. ,Here is my HDTune result - I think it compares ok to others of the same make - would you agree?I'll now have a go at running the CoreTemp/Prime 95 and CPUZ combo and see how I get onthanksJon

Just curious,could you download and run the following application and tell me what clockspeed your CPU is running at?http://www.cpuid.com/download/cpuz_148.zipSeems something may be misconfigured in your BIOS, I suspect perhaps the CPU is running at a much lower clock than it should be. Also, check the performance tab of task manager (hit ctrl-alt-del) and tell us how many CPU cores are active. You can find this out by counting the number of graphs under the "CPU Usage History" heading. Your CPU should be running at 3GHz and you should see 2 CPU graphs in task manager. If either of these are untrue, your BIOS is misconfigured and this would be the cause of the performance issues you are seeing.

Hi Jon.Sorry for the delay, I was out flying most of the day today.Yes, that is in lone with the type of system you have. See if you get the rest and determine if you are running at max. clock rate that your system is capable of.To give you a little back ground of why we do what we do, and that will make more sense to you.Prime 95 will stress your system to it's max capacity, the temps will be as high as you can get them, and the Clock rate will be forced as high as the BIOS will allow. The reason behind that is two fold, make sure your CPU is not throttling down, or is restricted in BIOS, and Core temp will tell you if you overheat, which can also cause the Clock rate to be lowered to protect the CPU.CPUZ / ID will give the other info on the Memory, Video, Bios ver. etc. I hope that this will make sense to the reasoning / logic behind these tests. TV

Hi Jon.Sorry for the delay, I was out flying most of the day today.Yes, that is in lone with the type of system you have. See if you get the rest and determine if you are running at max. clock rate that your system is capable of.To give you a little back ground of why we do what we do, and that will make more sense to you.Prime 95 will stress your system to it's max capacity, the temps will be as high as you can get them, and the Clock rate will be forced as high as the BIOS will allow. The reason behind that is two fold, make sure your CPU is not throttling down, or is restricted in BIOS, and Core temp will tell you if you overheat, which can also cause the Clock rate to be lowered to protect the CPU.CPUZ / ID will give the other info on the Memory, Video, Bios ver. etc. I hope that this will make sense to the reasoning / logic behind these tests. TV

Thanks - sorry for the delay in getting back to you - been very busy!I will do the extra tests - before I do so can you tell me if it is possible my motherboard just doesn't support my CPU. I noticed today that my CPU is not on the list of supported CPUs for my motherboard. However better and worse CPUs are so I assumed (when looking for CPUs to buy) that it would work as it fell in the middle of the list of supported CPUs. Was I wrong to assume that?thanks

Thanks - sorry for the delay in getting back to you - been very busy!I will do the extra tests - before I do so can you tell me if it is possible my motherboard just doesn't support my CPU. I noticed today that my CPU is not on the list of supported CPUs for my motherboard. However better and worse CPUs are so I assumed (when looking for CPUs to buy) that it would work as it fell in the middle of the list of supported CPUs. Was I wrong to assume that?thanks

Well, It seems to me that if the MB didn't support the CPU, then the computer might not even boot. Yes, it is best to reformat and reinstall windows. If you are using XP and not Vista, you can reactivate windows online. Come to think of it, I just reactivated Vista online also. Anyway, an upgrade like yours is easy,but you must make sure all your new components go together. sit down with all the paperwork that came with your new stuff and double check. Then go through all your bios settings(although most should set automaticly. I just got a new MB that has jumpers to set the FSB. It comes from the factory on the slowest setting. Maye you've got something like that. I saw no MB with the number you gave in your first post. Could you double check that for us. And is that a single core CPU?Bob

Well, It seems to me that if the MB didn't support the CPU, then the computer might not even boot. Yes, it is best to reformat and reinstall windows. If you are using XP and not Vista, you can reactivate windows online. Come to think of it, I just reactivated Vista online also. Anyway, an upgrade like yours is easy,but you must make sure all your new components go together. sit down with all the paperwork that came with your new stuff and double check. Then go through all your bios settings(although most should set automaticly. I just got a new MB that has jumpers to set the FSB. It comes from the factory on the slowest setting. Maye you've got something like that. I saw no MB with the number you gave in your first post. Could you double check that for us. And is that a single core CPU?Bob

Hi,It is a double core CPU - the AMD 64 X2 6000+The motherboard is a ASUS M3N78-EH http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&amp...amp;modelmenu=1I have reinstalled and reactivated windows xp but it made no difference. According to my manual the only jumpers are to clear RTC RAM and to wake up USB devices.thanksJon

Thanks - sorry for the delay in getting back to you - been very busy!I will do the extra tests - before I do so can you tell me if it is possible my motherboard just doesn't support my CPU. I noticed today that my CPU is not on the list of supported CPUs for my motherboard. However better and worse CPUs are so I assumed (when looking for CPUs to buy) that it would work as it fell in the middle of the list of supported CPUs. Was I wrong to assume that?thanks

Hi, Jon.The fact that your system is running, it's a good indicator, even if your Mobo does not list your CPU, it may still be supported, to an extent, i.e. you may not be able to run at full Clock rate.Post the results of your other tests, and we will go from there, I would not go into any drastic reinstalls right now, let's see what your CPU is running at?. It's more likely that you are not running at full click speed. See if there is anyone else around that uses the same Processor, maybe a post specific to it may help to find out what the Benchmarks are? TV

Hi,It is a double core CPU - the AMD 64 X2 6000+The motherboard is a ASUS M3N78-EH http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&amp...amp;modelmenu=1I have reinstalled and reactivated windows xp but it made no difference. According to my manual the only jumpers are to clear RTC RAM and to wake up USB devices.thanksJon

If you download and run the application I linked to earlier we can get a better idea for what's going on here.

Honestly, I recommend a complete reformat and reinstall of Windows.Whenever I do a major hardware change I format and reinstall the OS. There's so many little annoying driver conflicts and crap that can happen if you don't format/reinstall....But the Max dude is right, you want to make sure your CPU is running at the correct speed, and CPUz would let us know.