Dell XPS under performing

I brought a Dell Dimension XPS for Christmas. Here are the specs:

Pentium 4, 3.4GHz with HT.

1GB DDR2 RAM (four 256MB sticks to my amazement)
256MB GeForece 6800 GTO (PCI-Express)

 

The reason I brought the machine was for gaming. Looking at the specs you would think that it would be able to run any game with maximum settings at a good frame rate throughout.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. After buying and then installing latest games on the machine such as Half-Life 2 and Far Cry I was expecting a very good solid frames per second even with the settings at maximum detail. With these specs it should, but I am finding that is not the case at all. I am finding that the frames per second can get very low even getting as low as 25 in games such as Counter-Strike Source. Also, not only in new games, but older games that were out around 2002. Now with these specs that should not be happening. I think there must be something wrong.

First thing that worried me is that they included four memory sticks which are all 256MB. Surely they should of put two 512MB sticks in there to be safe, but some clever Dell engineer decided to add four 256MB sticks when there was clearly no point in that. Although either way it adds to 1GB i'm sure four sticks would not be the way to do it, and instead include two 512MB.

I also noticed how hot the system gets. When it goes under moderate to heavy load in graphics applications you will hear the fan getting louder, louder and louder. Also, I can actually feel the heat coming from the system as I sit at my desk. It actually makes the whole area around the system very warm and I need to go away and cool down a bit, to me this didn't seem right at all.

The main problem though is it's performance. It just isn't performing to well and with those specs it should be. Bare in mind this is dual channel ram with a powerful processor, along with a very good graphics card. It should be performing better and there must be a solution somewhere.

As for finding the problem I am very unsure as to what it could be. The system itself is up to date with the latest drivers, and latest Windows update. Everything is set up correctly yet the performance is still not that great. Something is definately not right.

Perhaps someone in these message boards could help me out, after all that's why I registered.

Thanks...