computer help pleaseFollow

If you are seeing notifications for a Catalyst driver, chances are that is indeed still in your system. You may be able to remove it from Add / Remove programs (or programs and features under windows 7), looking for any AMD or ATI catalyst entries. If you don't know very much about driver removal I would suggest staying very far away from any driver sweeper or registry editing programs.

As far as your questions:

1.that score is right within the capabilities of that card. I wouldn't be at all suprised to see you could tune it and maybe make some other system modifications to get into the 3,500 range with that card, but I wouldn't expect more out of it than that. It's a solid upper mid range prior year model card. It uses a different rendering engine than the 200 series cards did, so its actually technically slower than a 260GTX unless the game takes advantage of the Fermi rendering engine, which the FFXIV demo might not. That also depends on the size of the monitor you are running too. That card isn't going drive a large monitor at high numbers. Anything over a 22" might give you some performance decrease with just the one card.

2. For your card, adding a second one would be known as SLI, or Scalable Link Interface. Crossfire is only for ATI cards. You can run two 460GTX's, or more, depending on the motherboard you have, but a 600 watt PSU isn't going to be anywhere close to enough wattage to safely run a second card. I'd need to know more details like what specific model motherboard you are running. Also, AMD / ATI motherboards tend to be optomized for AMD / ATI cards, not Nvidia cards. If you are going with an AMD motherboard, an ATI card in a crossfire array would have been a better route to go. I tend to prefer the Intel processors myself, and either way will work. You would see some added benifits from going ATI with that motherboard combination though. And yeah, see the above comment about staying far away from driver sweepers if at all possible.

3. Hard drive speed is definitly a possible problem, especially during character loading. There are slow hard drives out there, any of the western digital "green" series drives for example are decent at data storage, but horribly, horribly slow for actually trying to run anything off of. Knowing which hard drives you have would be helpful (speed and capacity, or model number is fine too). It could also be a drive with issues. Disk defragmentation is something that slows down loading of MMO characters on occasion, launching and running disk defragmenter may haelp (unless you already have a solid state drive, then disk defragmenting is useless) Upgrading to a faster hard drive will also help, though you picked a really really bad time for that as about 40% of the worlds hard drive manufactureing capacity is currently under water in Thailand flooding and won't be back online for another 5 months or so. Solid state drives are a huge speed improvement under windows 7, and definitly worth it, but they are spendy. A good sized one will run you more than your video card. Also, never, ever, ever buy an OCZ Solid state drive. Trust me on this. If a SSD is out of the budget, try looking for a 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor drive in a sufficiently large size. That should give you a 10-15 percent boost over what you have already. A SSD will give you about a 30% boost in loading speedup easily.

The last thing you will also want to check for Hard drives, is download and run the free "speedfan" utility and check the section for hard drive "S.M.A.R.T" errors. That section reports health of your hard drive. If either of the two main indicators in their are significantly lower than 90%, you have a hard drive that isn't happy and you need to replace it immidiatly. If they are up near 100%, your drive is probably fine.

alright, yeah, your motherboard won't support SLI or crossfire as it exists at the moment.

That 1Tb hard drive in that particular model is a 1TB 7,200 RPM hard drive. Which is about standard in terms of speed. 5400 RPM drives or slower are the low end ones. 10,000 RPM drives are higher end, then you get the non rotational solid state drives, 15,000 RPM SaS drives and all those assorted fun topics.

Video card really depends on what your budget looks like. Putting a really high end, high dollar video card (or more than one)in a machine with a lower end processor results in you not getting a good video experiance. Same thing with putting a really low end video card in a higher end machine. You'll have to look at what you have that is useable in your current machine, what budget you have to spend on a new one, and how far out it might be before you have money for upgrades. You want to look at where you realistically want to go in terms of performance and then start with a good solid core that matches that vision. For example, if you are going to build a high end gaming pc, you don't necessarily have to start with a high end gaming PC. Get a really good case, since you won't be replacing it for 5-10 years, a really good power supply in the 1,000 range witha lifetime warranty (enermax or equivelent) and a really good motherboard you can use as a foundation to build off of. From there you can throw in a minimum of ram, whatever processor you can afford, a video card, drives, etc, and upgrade a piece at a time, but without having to buy a whole new computer or upgrade any base components.

For someone who is looking for a mid range gaming machine on occasion, the strategy is a bit different, and focuses more on the "buy it all at once and leave it alone" end of the spectrum.

For a gaming rig, video horsepower is key. You want the meanest video card you can afford, assuming your other components are built up to support it, and prefferably more than one if you will be running large or multiple monitors.

I currently have two 280 GTX SST's in my main pc, which were an experemental variant of the standard 280 that has the processor of a 280, but the faster ram of a 285. They are still pretty fast, but they are starting to show their age a bit. They happen to be the weak point in my particular machine. I'd like to swap them out for a pair of 590 GTX's, but thats not in the budget for a while. Realistically i'll probably gab a single 590 and then add a second one later. It's just such a pain to find water cooling blocks that match if you don't buy them in pairs, and water blocks themselves add another $120 to the price of each card easily.

The other thing you have to look at is the games you play. Will they take advantage of a monster video card? Do you have a large enough monitor to make a higher end video card worthwhile? Any current video card on the planet can render any game in an 800x600 window at full speed, its just when you start making the windows bigger with more stuff in them that things get complicated. What kind of monitor do you have? would it be more cost effective to buy a bigger monitor and a second 460 now and then upgrade later? Thats all going to depend on your budget.

If you have a rough idea of what you have available to spend, I can give you an idea of what a build it yourself build will cost and what types of components you would be looking at if you want.