Bad FPS in COD4, need help. Anyone have any tips/advice?

[eminent]

Hello everyone, abp/Eminent here... First let me say, I'm glad to be here on playing another game on Cainslair, this time COD4.I normally never make topics but this ones a special case because... I'm new to Call of Duty 4 for the PC and need some advice/tips on certain things. Now let me say I do have prior experience w/ this game and it mechanics, as for the last week I've been using my brother-in-laws PS3 version of this game and I'm @t level 43. However, hes going to be picking it up tomorrow and not to mention I prefer the mouse than the controller, so I bought COD4 for the PC off of steam yesterday. It sucks to be @t level 1 again but I'll be back up soon enough. Now let me stop rambling...

Upon playing the game, the first thing I noticed is that this game looks very different from the PS3 version, oddly enough its not a good thing. As I played them both at the same and side by side ps3 was winning, it could be that my computer is using 17'inch CRT and ps3 is using 32'inch LCD @ 720p. The PS3 looked had vivid colors and ran @t constant 60fps and down to 30fps in smoke+18 player Domination, etc. With everything turned on my PC averages 70fps (120-140fps standing) but the colors are washed out and very dak and if I increase the brightness it still looks dull, and in firefights it drops to 20-30s real quick.So I'm still worried that it may either be my config or setup. So I want to know if anyone has any tips/modifs that would be too use to have COD4 @t least look decent while maintaining reasonable FPS.

My setup
Windows XP Pro x64 Edition (Running SP2)
AMD Athlon 64 x2 3600+ (clocked @ 1.91GHz) *6400+ soon*
10 Mb/s Cable *took about 2 1/2 to 3 hours to DL COD4 on steam*
2x 1 GB Ram (DDR400)
2x 500 WD 7,200 SATA HDD(Raid1)
GeForce 8800 GTS (640mb) *Running Latest Drivers*
1280 x 1024 (Desktop Res)
1024 x 768 (Game Res)
17inch CRT *22 or 24inch Samsung LCD soon*

While a decent setup the only bottleneck that I see is on the processor side, but I haven't been able to find any actual COD4 benchmarks to compare and see if that is the problem. Let me also mention I have also tried the "optimal settings" and still think I should be getting better FPS (so I assume I'm going to need to disable somethings). So my question to all is do any of you have similar setups and still pull decent frame rates, if so what is your Setup/Config like (Textures,AA,Shadows, etc), and is there any "eye candy" that you have disabled and even if its not similar but you get decent FPS while playing in the lair what are your settings.
I appreciate any and all help you all may give, hope to see/frag you all soon.
Thanks again.

[-IRC-MIKE]

You're getting better than I am and I play just fine at about 45-50 FPS.

[CarbonFire]

That CPU and DDR400 RAM can't be helping things much. Aside from that though, make sure your 8800gts is running with the fan up to at least 75% or more, as it defaults to a paltry 25% to reduce noise (this is especially true if you have the Overclocked edition). Use Rivatuner to set the fan right if you haven't already.

As for colors being washed out, that's gotta be more about drivers and display than the version of the game. I could make the game BLEED color if I wanted by tweaking settings, but then it would be harder to play IMO because everything would be too distracting. On the performance side, you probably want to tweak with things like AA, Dynamic lights, depth of field and soft particles (smoke/fog). These are usually the biggest performance sinks beyond just resolution, so you may need to crank em down if your performance is sucking.

And remember, even though you've got a really good graphics card, the rest of your system just can't feed it fast enough to reach it's full potential.