First off, here's the rig I'm running.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Conroe 3.0GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
3.00 GHz, 3.25GB of RAM.
BFG Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ OC (Had an 8800gt until 2 days ago when it fried, got the new card to replace it)
ASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard

Now the problem. I can't keep my games on full on MAX settings without dipping down into the 30-50fps ranges when in heavy graphical areas. In alot of cases it's usually smoking along at 75-100fps, and I love it. I want it to be 75-100 EVERYWHERE at MAX settings. So my question is, what do I do?

Do I upgrade certain parts or sell the whole thing off and buy a completely new system? I've been debating this for a few weeks now but the new video card got me thinking of what I should do from here.

1 extra GB of RAM could help you out there.

More than that, only a more powerful CPU.

Maybe your just asking too much of your rig at certain games. Crysis at full for example is heavy on almost any machine right now.

That's a good question, how do you have 3.25gigs of ram?

Is the graphics card one of those shared memory beasts?

You should have your memory in pair sets to get it to work in dual mode

Increase you page file to 2 gigs and set it at that, (2 gig min - 2 gig max) then it won't move about on you drive

You don't really need much page file with 3 gigs of memory but what the hell why not.

Defragment your hard drive, keep it that way use O&O defrag it's the best in my opinion
make sure you have the windows jlive journaling service stopped. You don't need it for anything and it fragments the Sh** out of the hard drive.
stop it from services.msc or msconfig
if it was running get rid of the fragments by
FSUTIL USN DELETEJOURNAL /D C:


Enjoy.
P

I have 4gb or RAM, 2 sets of 2gb, but it's on a 32bit OS so it's only reading up that much.

I've defragged, registry cleaned, avast scanned and adaware scanned.

A 32-bit OS will read up to 4GB, but windows will only allocate up to 2GB per application (because like all things windows, it likes to fuck you for no reason.) So more memory will not help you. Is 30-50 FPS really that horrible? I was happy to get 20 back in the good old days when I played PC games...

I would say it's your ram. Looking at the amount you have I doubt it would be running in Multiple Channel mode and that is going to cause a serious performance hit. With DDR you should run in matched pairs.

OK - you said you have a SLI rated mobo and the graphics card is SLI. However, is the memory & powersupply also SLI rated? If not, the powersupply may not be giving the GPU enough juice & you may be throttled at the RAM.

Also - I note that the GPU is running 1/2 Gig of memory - might be a bit thin. If you have the $$$$ buy another GPU & bridge them.