Help me please major problems

[confuzed]

hi all.
New to this and this is my first post, any help advise would be most welcome.

my setup:

Athlon 2400+
Gigabyte GA-7VAXP ULTRA motherboard
512 meg pc 2700 Ram
Leadtek winfast a400 tdh Graphics card
15 inch LCd monitor at 1024*768 max res

my problems:
Installed the Leadtek and got a 3dmark score of 7995
seemed ok to me !

but then I ran some games
Doom 3 was really jumpy and basically unplayable at any setting
clicking auto detect simply offered me a 640*480 with everything on lowest setting!!!
Farcry..even worse any interior scenes looked like they were in a negative overbright kinda mess...the exterior was really screwed up with parts of the beaches being black and the roofs of the huts ect were bright white..again auto detected gave me the lowest settings available?
Pandora tomorrow seemed to play fine tho?
So after uninstalling and reinstalling the card and various drivers with no improvement I gave up and took the card back for a refund.
I still want a 6800 graphics card , but is there something about my system that would cause these problems?. or maybe a duff card?
Is the fact that my monitor is only 1024*768 mean that I will never see the benefits of using a geforce 6?

please any help would be great before I spend any more cash

cheers

[keith33]

The Doom 3 auto-detect feature gives me that 640x480 "recommended" rubbish too (yet I can still play at 1600x1200). Try doing a full reinstall of Windows with the new 65.73 drivers and see if it makes a difference. My 3Dmark score went up 5000 points (yes, that's not a typo) after I reinstalled windows because of all the catalyst garbage entries in my registry from my old radeon card. Farcry looks like garbage on all 6-series cards unless you get the 1.1 version patch. The black stuff happened to me too. The 6800 NU is the ideal card for playing games at 1024x768, try the stuff i said above and see if it makes a difference. I hope this helps.

[confuzed]

keith,
your a star , thanks for making me feel better about my system at least!
I have done a reformat now but I have taken the card back ,Going to buy a new one on monday. I will also get the farcry 1.1 patch
nice to know someone else had the same problems.
cheers