=/ Thats the problem you went with a quad core. No games as of current (NO GAMES) use all 4 cores without heavy modification which ends up busting it anyways. Even Crysis, claimed to be a 4 core game, really only uses 2 to run basically everything, 4 cores will net you "Awesome" physics, where plants and crap react to your presence but everything else? Lags behind.

 At present, Quad Core is the -BEST- set up to use for gaming. But for sins, a single, QUALITY, core would be best, as its an older game, dual core as well, mine is dual but lags slightly after fleet caps have been reached by 8 sides at most.

I suppose I'll throw this up for discussion's sake. I have PIIx4 at 4.1 GHz 1.5v, MSI790FX-GD70, NB at 2600 at 1.35v, Crucial DDR3 1333 1.65v 7-7-7-24 and a pair of 5870's. Back when I first ran into this problem I was playing a huge random map against all unfair ai and about 5-6 hours in the game slowed to like 10 FPS. Now I can do about 30-35 FPS on those maps. Memory speed is irrelevant, lower clocks are more important.

For Sins absolutely.  Even using just 1 GPU during Sins the GPU utilization never goes over 20 percent. Ram made a pretty solid difference for me as well. AMD cpus seem to like clock speed alot more than mhz, mostly because they are somewhat limited by the integrated memory controller on CPU which is 1066 on C2 chips and 1333 on C3 chips. If you have 1600 ram on a C2 chip and try to get low clocks you will get a sync flood error crash. (Usually anyways).