Poor performance for core i5

[dal]

Hi all, I've recently upgraded my system from this :


Asus A8N-E nForce4 Ultra - SOCKET 939
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ Venice 90nm @2.6 Ghz ** SINGLE CORE **
RAM : 2GB DDR
graphics - X850 XT PE 256MB

to the specs in my sig ( same graphics card, HDD,optical drives and OS )
I'm running windows XP home

But I've not really noticed a difference in performance & in the case of playing sim city just now I'd say performance is worse ,
In fact if I didnt know better I'd say the system hasnt had a upgrade at all.

I've not done any CPU benchtests on it yet which is what I need to do but has anyone got some idea as to what could be wrong. I've done a clean install of the OS then installed the drivers on the CD that came with the mobo.
I mean windows takes about the same amount of time to boot up, opening up internet explorer isnt any quicker, I feel like somthing is very wrong but i dont know what.

 

[dal]

The hard drive is sata 2 and is about 19 months old.

 

[dal]

Maybe I'm just expecting too much !!

Can anyone recommend a CPU benchmark program I could use to check just the CPU performance.

 

[dal]

Exactly,

People need to start thinking before upgrading instead of just looking at all the "extreme performance i5/i7" adverts.

A just gpu, hdd/ssd and ram upgrade will do a lot better for that system than even i9.

True what you've said but I do intend to add a better graphics card within the next month & I'll probably upgrade to windows 7.
Cheers for the input though guys.

 

[dal]

My PSU is a tagan 480 W ( sli enabled ) and is the same age as my graphics card.
I did wonder if my psu was up to the job but if that was at fault surely if be getting random crashes and stuff like that ( allthough it has just switched itself off and restarted for no apparent reason on one occassion)
I dont know if this has got anything to do with it but every now and again I get a very short bleep from the case speaker & when i mean short i mean like a blip ( 1/4 second ) but this can happen even when the PC is idle so I'd say it's unrelated to power.
I've looked in the manual at the bleep codes and there is nothing for what I've just described.