Is Problem Bad Video Card, Drivers ?

Have a Dell P4/3GHz, 800 FSB, 1Gig RAM, 875P Chipset, AGP-8X, WinXP Pro
SP1. Have had Nvidia-based cards for years. Last weekend, bought an ATI
Radeon 9800 Pro-128MB. CompUSA had them on sale for $349. Am just
trying it out, and will exchange for FX 5900 if not happy.

Anyway, with Radeon 9800, I could run 3DMark03 with Catalyst 3.4 drivers
(shipping drivers), but it slowed down horribly during the Trolls Lair
scene, to less than 5 FPS. In the last Trolls Lair test for CPU, it
slowed down again to less than 5FPS. It barely got through it.

Is this normal for others? Does everyone else, regardless of graphics
card, experience these kinds of slowdowns during this scene?

Anyway, got score of about 5,000. I then upgraded to latest ATI drivers
(ver 3.7). ATI says they should be as fast, if not faster than 3.4.
Now, I can't even run 3DMark03. It starts, get's past the first Trolls
Lair at same 5FPS or less, then the program shuts down totally during
the first or last Trolls Lair test. I've made sure the drivers were
installed correctly, card settings are normal. I even set the D3D and
OpenGL to "Performance" versus "Quality" in all settings. Still,
3DMark03 won't finish. It just shuts down during that last test, and
goes back to Windows Desktop. Only twice out of 20 times, has it been
able to complete 3DMark03 with 3.7 drivers..just out of luck, I guess.

When I checked the online 3DOrb, I noticed almost all users of ATI card
with high 3DMark03 scores were using the 3.7 drivers (a few with 3.6)
and getting higher scores (in the 6000-7000 range).

Appreciate any info on the slowdowns in the Trolls lair, if others
experience this. Also, am using 3DMark Build 330. I tried the Build
320 without the patch, and I got an error when starting the program. I
had to install the 330 patch, just to get 3DMark03 to run.

Thanks for any advice.
jj.