Post a HijackThis log. That should give people a good insight into the functions of your computer.

You might need to compare between the entire collection of hardware your friend has. Not all processors with the same clock speed are created equal. Plus, he might have some dynamic overclocking software. Then there's also your motherboard to take into consideration. Then after that determine if you have any additional card components that might be causing delays at some point.

Overall if you're outclassing his system with a greater cpu, graphics card and a greater capacity of ram at a better clock speed, you are right in believing you should have better performance. It would fall to determening the software faults. Ie: if you're using vista and xp, you will definitly not outperform him with a better pc. Then there's still the malware issue, and then drivers. I could think of a few things you can do to check for issues that could be contaminating your operating environment.

Tl;dr

Yeah...my friend is pretty computer illiterate, someone built the system for him and I found out the difference, and it makes sense after I did some research...

I went to the WHA forums and read the thread of people posting specs and framerates in various situations in the game...whenever I saw my processor I noted lower frames...so today I ask my friend to read specifically what his processor says...and guess what...he now knows what the words dual core means...haha.

I was happy to be able to return to thinking about updating my mobo/processor since I knew single core wasn't going to cut it much longer for gaming.

You may be surprised to know however that dual core was still a fairly new technology. Its been ironed out a bunch now as we are moving towards quad core. Buuuuut what its important to know is that specific applications and games made before a certain time were not made with multi threading in mind(and most games now still don't fully utilize the extra 2 cores in a quad core box) for example, source engine based games don't make heavy second core use, while something like age of conan will make extensive use of all of them.

Its a good rule of thumb to move in that direction these days as the tech will continue to improve ^^;

Yeah...I remember when I first started hearing about quad core and that people (like another friend of mine) bought it without really knowing what it was or if they needed it.

I was thinking about trying a quad out so that when it's what games are more prepared for I'd have it, but I'm not sure as to which one would have the best price/performance kinda ratio. I'm trying not to spend oodles again, but want this computer to at least run WAR well, since atm I don't know what other games I plan on playing.

Currently I'm probably going to get an E7200: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ.....82E16819115052

And the Mobo I'm not too sure on, I want a solid one with for around 100$, and have been thinking about an ASUS P5K: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ.....82E16813131275 but I've had friends tell me the nForce SLI Mobos are pretty nice, so the ASUS P5N-D was another choice...but I'm not likely to ever pick up another GPU, so I don't know if it'll be worth it.

I currently have a quad core phenom (promised myself this year I wouldn't spend a lot of my machine) because I wanted to keep my AM2 motherboard, so it was a good affordable upgrade. Performance speaking, in theory it can do nearly 10ghz in combined performance, in reality it performs much like a mid grade dual core before it.(again also depends greatly on the program..it bugs me to see that 80% of the games I play make hardly any use of the 2 additional cores) I think the technology needs to mature more to reach its peak usefulness, and also a lot of the quads are a little buggy still(early amd quads would cause the systems to freeze for example)

As for a mainboard, the nforce chipset is good and really solid. But im gonna say if you can get a board with features minus the sli, go for it. The sli is just an extra price premium, and recently after trying an sli configuration for myself I figured out that its really not worth it. The setup was 2 geforce 8800 gts's, the single cards performance was actually better than when I had both cards installed, the sli config running at an average of 40-60 fps where the single card would push 140+ very disappointing >.>;

Also: I didn't say before but that's a cute character X3

Yeah...I just never saw SLI as worth it for what it could do. I dunno if there's any nforce boards without SLI, but if they are I'll probably take your advice and look into it.

And my characters are meh...I still need to commission more and make them less boring :)

Originally I bought the sli board thinking that after a year or so, when the gpu I currently had dropped enough in price, id buy a second one and take the sli for a test run. Seeing as it looked good on paper and would fall under 'affordable upgrade'...that didn't work out at alllll. But like I said, its a price premium and its most likely if you get any board with a wealth of features its gonna have sli. That's fine since it doesn't change the regular performance.

I actually really like that commish you got from drechu, love the greens X3

Yeah...I thought the coloring he did on that one was absolutely kickass. It made me really happy to have commissioned him.

The coloring is one thing, but I thought the overall composition was great. Between that, the cute pose and that very nice face she had :3 for much the same reason I really loved mine and had to get another @_@;;;