I of course have updated drivers in the past. Some make my system hinky and I have to roll them back. Latley though I've noticed that next generation games default to the low settings. As I have previously posted I HAD a high end system 3 years ago and everything defaulted to the highest settings. I realize my graghics card is out of date, but I was wondering if upgrading my processor drivers would help. I have 4 Intel Quad core processors. My system is air cooled and I do not want to over-clock.

You have a quad core machine or you actually have 4 quad core processors on your motherboard? I can't imagine a machine like that being air cooled, it would sound like an airline hanger with a C-130 running in it -- plus if you don't consider 4 quad cores a high end system then nothing will satisfy you....

Back to your question about drivers, I can't imagine that updrading the cpu drivers would help, but at the same time, you should always update your drivers as new ones come out and only roll back if the new ones cause problems.

I think the answer to your problems actually lies with the video card ram that you have. Older games got by fine on 32m of video memory, then 64m, now we are up to 1gb video cards. My 256 card is constantly messing up under Windows 7 and I still can't figure out why, so I'll be upgrading soon also.

Your answer lies in your vid card. Post your complete system specs plus your windows version and we'll see if there is anything out of place...

Ok......system specs:
FOUR Intel Quad core processors at 2.40ghz
Nvidia GFORCE 8600GT graphics with 512mb memory
2 gigs system memory
360gig RAID hard drive
microsoft system rating of 5.4 out of 6
Vista home premium sp2 32 bit.
Unsure of front bus speed. And yes the system is air cooled and at times does make a lot of fan noise depending on what I'm doing. Upgrading the vid drivers reaks havoc and I end up rolling them back. I agree the problem most likley lies in the vid card. I still think the system is high end but 3 yrs ago it was "higher" end.

Dude, running 4 quad-core procs. That's just sick lol. But IMO, updating the chipset or other drivers generally doesn't make a HUGE difference, unless there was a really nasty bug in them to begin with. You have a good video card, it's older now, but still remains one of the most loved cards of all time.

It might help to upgrade your memory. Memory is so cheap now, it's almost silly to not have at least 4GB. I recently upgraded my PC and bought 4GB of DDR3 memory, and it was under $100. Also, a point about the memory, if you have dual channel memory (which you totally should), make sure that you have the chips in the right slots for them to operate that way. If you put dual channel memory in the wrong order, you're essentially cutting your performance in half. The "right order" will depend on what motherboard you have, as there is no one right way to do it. It all depends on your mobo.

Also, you said you're running a 360GB RAID hard drive. Does this mean that you're running 2 hard drives with a mirror RAID, or that you're running 3+ hard drives with striping on that total up to 360GB? You can't run a single drive in RAID to my knowledge. And even if you could, it would be pointless.

Another thing to think about is: how long has it been since you've reinstalled Windows? If it's been a long time, you might wanna go that route. If you're really trying not to spend any money, you can also check out the web to find guides that'll tell you how to tweak you're rig. There's tons of them out there. I've used them and they work well. Go through SERVICES.MSC and disable any services you don't need (trust me, there's a lot).

Sorry for the late reply, my hard drive crashed last week and I literally got my PC working again like an hour ago

we'll see what happens. I'll probably just live with it until I can upgrade my memory. Been wanting to do that for a while anyway. My hard drive configuration is raid...360gig for the OS and a 10gig recovery disk. Thanks for the help.

Another late response -- if you've already fixed this, then let us know...

If you really are running four separate quad core processors and you are having problems then you most certainly have a memory problem. Although, as I said before, I can't imagine you having an air-cooled 4 processor mobo on a normal desktop without the sound of the fans blowing you away.... But anyway. also, like I said before, if your games defaulted to high before, and low now, then it is more than likely that your video card is just being overloaded. Even though it is a 256 card and it is one of the most loved, it may not be enough for what you want. Then again, when the video card memory runs out, it utilizes system memory, of which you have 2 GB available for total system usage. Remember that Vista is a memory hog and will tie up available memory for things that it is not even using at that particular time, so that could be your problem.... The good news is that Vista will recognize larger memory, unlike XP that has a max of 3gb.

If I had any recommendation it would be to 1) upgrade to W7 (but make sure you keep good backups -- I just downgraded from W7 back to XP Pro because of a major display issue) and 2) install more memory -- and like lost said, if you have dual channel support, make sure it is installed correctly.

I would do #2 regardless if you upgrade to W7 or not since Vista will recognize larger memory.

Let us know how you get on, or if you got it fixed already, how you did it...