I just recently upgraded my motherboard and CPU. I have an AMD 64 3200 cpu and an Asus A8V-MX motherboard. The motherboard was pretty cheap, so I'm thinkin that might be the problem, but I want to ask some more professionals like you guys, because the people at the store where I bought it are about the opposite of professionals haha.

Everything else I had, RAM, sound card, video card, hard drives, are all the same as I had before, the only thing new is the mobo and cpu. So here's my problem(s). First of all, I noticed an odd ticking noise and sometimes bursts of static in my sound through my sound card. I solved that by simply using my onboard sound. But I have also noticed other unnacceptable things. Like, when I play games, games that I've played many a time before on my slower system, they run choppy; when more is happening on the screen, like for instance when there is more moving pixels, everything seems to move more slowly, or a sort of "lag" effect. It makes the game downright unplayable, especially online(and it's not lag due to being online, i get an excellent ping).

Also, during regular windows stuff, like downloading, and using various software apps that I've always used, the computer will be cruising along at a nice fast speed like it should, but then suddenly everything sort of freezes, and I gotta sit there and wait 10-30 seconds because I can't click on anything, I can't switch between applications, I can't click the start menu, and it will just sit there while I consider resetting. Then suddenly it instantly snaps out of it and everything kind of just finishes what it was doing all at once and then its running great again as if nothing happened. This started happening right after a fresh Windows XP install too by the way. I barely had any programs installed so there is little clutter, but this started happening almost immediately with barely anything on the hard drive.

So what's going on here? I've got the latest video card driver, and everything else was working fine before I made the swap. Some ideas I've had are: I'm still using older ram, PC2100, which I was told shouldn't be a problem, but who knows? i'm just speculating. I'm also thinking it's the motherboard, because all my problems seem to be linked, the weird sound problem, the video problem, and the freezing problem, all seem to have started with the new stuff, and I wouldn't think it could be the processor?

So, I would really appreciate any obeservations from you guys, I know this was a long *** post, but I'm getting desperate here, and am sick of calling the techs at the store who would rather I just go die than bother helping me out.