i've run some games on a 64bit xp w/ a dual 6000 amd & 4gb ram + nvidia 8800 but most games run sluggish at just 1024x or 1280x resolutions however, the hard drive is an "older" versions of an 80gb IDE (its has some years on it, i.e not one of the latest ide versions) could it be the ide itself that's slowing the pc? will it help in gaming's FPS if i switch to SATA? 10x in adv

There's generally not an extreme performance difference between PATA & SATA, but it would depend on the specs of your 80GB HDD, it's condition, how full it is, etc. Make sure all your drivers are up to date, the BIOS is properly tweaked & that Windows isn't bogged down with spyware/malware or a bunch of useless startup entries. "If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions" - Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) in Pulp Fiction

jam > it has only a clean installation with a couple of games. No internet connected; and not much applications installed (just latest nvidia drivers and some of asus's mainboard applications - which are not running the background) the IDE is a 2mb cache ata100 about half full (xp64 / games)

I would look just about everywhere else before I suspected the HDD data transfer rate was reducing fps in games. the boost in data transfer rate when you upgrade from PATA aka IDE (which i think was 100MBps or 133MBps) to SATA (1.5GBps/3.0GBps) sounds great, except that data transfer rates had yet to become a bottleneck on PATA when SATA1 came out, and SATA1 data transfer rates weren't limiting when SATA2 came out. It was as much a marketing move as anything else. If there was something else wrong with your old PATA hard drive, you would most likely see other symptoms, like instability or lockups, or an inability to boot into the OS.