Laggy/Bad Video Performance? Or what..

[livejamie]

I'm a casual gamer who enjoys playing MMORPGs like Cabal Online, Silkroad, and am looking forward to playing Aion.

I also like to play older FPS games like TF2, Quake III, Unreal, etc.

Lately I've been having a problem with any game that I play, my system will randomly freeze for about 15 seconds, usually looping what's going on sound-wise at the time.

Like if somebody's talking on vent they can be saying a sentance like "Today I had a nice day, I went to the grocery store."

But in the moment my computer is frozen I hear "Today I had a, Today I had a, Today I had a, Today I had a, Today I had a" for 15 seconds, then I'll hear the rest of the conversation that occured in that 15 seconds all at once.

I'm running XP on an Athlon64 2.2GHz, I have a Soundblaster X-fi Xtrememusic card and a 256mb GeForce 7600GT running at 1600x1200.

My DxDiag can be found here: http://pastie.org/513560

Is the problem I'm running into a result of my Video Card? What's going on?

I'm not looking to play Crysis or anything, but I'd like to be able to play my games at full settings without lag.

Thank you so much for reading this.

[xXpsychoXx]

Sounds like it may be your processor being overloaded, am i right in saying its a single core? if so that's probably why. I used to get the same on my old system that was an intel pentium 4

[livejamie]

Yeah, so I would want to get a dual-core processor? Tha'd probably involve getting a new computer overall right?

[xXpsychoXx]

It'd work out better to get a new system but theres no reason why you couldn't just buy a new processor if you know what kind of socket it is.
Dual cores a quite cheap now, i myself though got a 2.6 quad core for £125

[Ronin]

Hello Ronin, thanks for your response.

Here are the results of my CPUID test:
http://pastie.org/513640

I'm using the newest drivers from nvidia.com for my card, is there a better option?

I'm running XP Pro SP2 32-bit.

Did you take the temps in Windows or while gaming?

Did you upgrade that video card yourself?
What are your PSU specs?

[livejamie]

Oh just normally in Windows, I'll take them while gaming.

I posted the specs already, it's 7600GT and I put it in a while ago, yeah.

[xXpsychoXx]

You got me all wrong Ronin. I never said overheating, but overloading as in too much memory being used for the cpu to handle therefore causing it to freeze temporarily while the usage is over what it can handle and then starting again when it goes back under.
That's the only way i can think to explain it