Understanding Frame Rates completely

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It just isn't my night tonight. First I couldn't get a screen name that wasn't already In use, then after about 20 tries to get the code correct, I finally fired up the software and it read the code and entered it for me. Thank God for extrapolation software. My tired old eyes just couldn't make that code out.

Due to my age and my hands I decided to get a prebuilt computer instead of trying to build one myself this time. It is certainly not the best but I consider it fairly good. However, i was not satisfied with the performance in games, and decided to do something about it. I added 2 GB of RAM and a X1800XT video card. I made certain I had all the latest and greatest drivers. I also made certain all the old drivers was completely removed before adding the new ones. I am getting about the same frame rates now that I was getting with the little X300 video card and 1 G of RAM, no improvements. I then removed all video drivers and installed a X1900XTX video card and I still got no noticeable improvement. Then I swapped the RAM and still no noticeable improvement. Ghost Recon (McGraw) 5 -- 45, Gothic 5 -- 40, Morrowind 5 to 45.

Now I realize, that we are only as fast as our slowest part, that slowest part is our bottleneck. It is either our CPU, video card, RAM, front side bus speed. The problem can be finding out which one of those items is our bottleneck, although the numbers can tell us a lot -- it doesn't tell us everything.

So if anyone here has any thoughts or ideas, I would really welcome them.