Very good system, very low FPS

[Squick]

Ok, we are stumped, so I will post the entire situation here and hopefully someone will either have had the same situation or will be able to offer up some help.

We have two computers in the house, one is an Athlon 2200+, 1.5 gigs of DDR2700, Geforce4 Ti4600, 120 gig 7200 RPM 2 meg cache maxtor HD, this one is using an nForce2 motherboard. The other computer is very similar, Athlon 2000+, 1 gig of DDR2700, same video card, same hard drive, this one has a VIA motherboard.

The 2200+ never drops below 30 FPS, even at high detail with 100 people on the screen. The 2000+ drops to 5-10 FPS with only a tiny bit of action.

Here are the things we have done to isolate the problem, all to no success:

- Swap video cards
- Swap ram
- Install new hard drive on 2000+ and reload with a fresh load of XP, nothing but drivers and Planetside, did not help a bit.
- The 2000+ was using a soundblaster live, we replaced it with a Hercules Muse 5.1, and actually tried without any sound, neither helped.
- Updated Detinator drivers to the latest official, and the latest beta drivers.

The 2200+ gets 13000ish on 3DMark2001, the 2000+ gets 12000ish. No other game has the same issues, so we are not able to reproduce the problem anywhere except Planetside.

I do not want to pull the heatsinks off either processor since we do not have shims on them and we really do not want to ruin a processor putting the heatsink back on. So short of swapping motherboards, does anyone have any other suggestions? Has anyone ever had this happen to them in Planetside?

Thanks,

Squick