First of all, I want to thank everyone that helped me in this thread build my "Barebones" system. Of course, I ended up building it up a little more that I intended, but it was fun. Here is what I ended up with:

• Motherboard: Asus K8N-E Deluxe Serial ATA, etc.
• Chip: AMD 64 2800+ I went with the cheapest 64bit processor I could, so that my motherboard won't be the first thing to get outdated.
• Video Card: Asus V9400-X 128MB, NVidia MX4000 Here is where I went cheap and I think I'm really beginning to regret it.

I've been using my Sony VIAO notebook for the last several years, and it has an ATi Mobility Radeon 7500 w. 32MB of RAM. It runs Battlefield 1942 at upto 99fps (the game's limit) or 50-60fps when the battle gets going. The only thing I never liked about it was that it had only 32MB of RAM. I'm not a crazy gamer, I usually play games that are several years old, and this thing was fine except sometimes I could tell it was updaiting whatever was stored in memory and caused a pause. So, if I could get something as good as my two year old notebook, but with more memory, I thought I was fine. Especially for only 45 bucks.

Well, this card is really giving me a hard time. I updated the drivers to a version that is a month old (which would be about a year newer than the drivers on my notebook) with no help. In games, the smoke and water is GREEN and the transparency of water comes off as slivers of solid or blank space. And my frame rate is in the 30's, peaking in the 50's or so (rare). I've made sure that each and every setting "in game" for the video and sound is the same between both machines, but no luck.

I guess the reason for my post is to ask for some advice. Is it the card? The drivers? Maybe the PC (DirectX)? Am I wasting my time trying to get things to look right?

Here are some screen shots:

• Water Color Normal blue water on the old notebook. and Green "Detroit" water on the fancy new PC.
• Glare: Normal Humvee windshield with no glare. and Windsheild wth image of mountains "ghosting" into my view.
• Water's Edge: Nice water with transparency and smooth edges and from the new PC I get A pile of sharp edged vomit.

Is this thing fixable? (I'm not a hardware guy.) Or should I save for a new card that'll let me play Battlefield 2 this Spring?