Fresh install extremely slow

I trust you've tuned of most of the stuff related to power saving and fan control in the BIOS, another thing I've noticed is disabling the sound in BIOS as well.
Here are some of the combos I've tried

Best results I've had (below 10K) are
Asus M4A785D-M PRO with an Athlon II x2 250, 4GB ram, Kingston 120GB SSD and on board video.

Asus M2N68-AM-PLUS with an Athlon 64 X2 5200+, 4GB ram, Kingston 120GB SSD and a Radeon HD5450 card.

Asus A8N-SLI/A8N-SLI Deluxe with a Athlon 64 3800+, 4GB ram, Kingston 120GB SSD and a Radeon HD5450 card

Not the most recent combos, the A8N-SLI Deluxe are still going for a fair penny, the M4A785D-M I bought as a cpu\mb combo (no ram) off ebay for AUD $25.00 delivered.
Haven't overclocked any of the chips, but even the 3800+ wasn't as slow as you described. I didn't have as good results with the few Nvidia cards I tried......ones I just pulled out of the "useful bin". The SSD helped things along....one thing I'm going to play with is changing to LXDE desktop....one ancient machine with a PCI graphics card, don't laugh, had a big improvement.

I have a Asus M2N68-VM (has hdmi) I bought brand new for my HTPC and it's still going, even with an 80GB IDE disk.

But due to space constraints I've gone for one of these, due to recommendations from some gents on the forum.
www.newegg.com/global/au/Product/Product...Item=N82E16813157726

Cheers, yeah the CPU is set to run full pelt all the time, no speed stepping. Will try to find an AGP graphics card, might get stung for price though, aren't they collectors items now? The sole PCI slot is currently occupied with the parallel port card, can't replace that for obvious reasons.

Will turn off useless stuff like sound and overtemp protection (!) and see how I get on. Will probably bump it down to stock speed too and see if it makes a difference. Overclock is very modest though, I've had this exact CPU running much faster and hotter in my younger and wilder days. Maybe that's part of the problem?

To reiterate though, worked fine with Mach3 and W7.

EDIT: Scratch that, not AGP. A brown (or very dirty) PCI-E slot.

Are you able to change the mode on SATA interface ? AHCI vs IDE

If it runs W7 ok it should run Linux...........

Do you know what MB it is ?

I'd give this a go, just no make sure Linux is ok, I'd try either of the Slackware based versions.

puppylinux.com/

Hi all, just an update:

Installed a HD5450 1GB, operation is now silky smooth with no issues. Interesting to note that this Linux distro seems to be quite heavy on graphics resources compared to W7.

Thanks everyone for your help and advice.

Glad to see you are sorted.

Could have been a driver related issue........There is quite a difference in the graphic subsystem between Linux & Windows.

From "The WIndows 2000 Device Driver Book" page 9:
Since NT4.0, USER and GDI functions have been moved to kernel mode. User processes that request GUI services are sent to kernel-mode using the System Service Interface, an efficient process.

I'd say that things probably haven't changed a great deal.