I built my nephew a budget gaming rig. Athlon x4 II 640 3.2Ghz(quad-core) and an HD5770 1GB.
I am well aware that the 5770 is not powerful, but bare in mind that he plays on a 17 inch CRT monitor @ 1024x768 so it's not 1080p or even 720p.

I have not measured the FPS, but trust me, it was low enough to notice it. I say <30. Is the card not powerful enough or the CPU or both?

I played C2 for over a year with a 5770, minimum settings @1600*900 50-60 FPS, and I was recording too... So it can do it.

The question is, why doesn't it? The Athlon CPU does not have L3 cache I believe, but I certainly don't think that's the problem(though it starts waay slower than on my system). It has 4 gigs of ram, running Win7 x64 and yet...

In case you don't know lower the res, the more cpu bound games becomes.In your case the slow cpu is bottlenecking that card badly.And yeah MP is always more cpu bound than SP.Strange it may sound you can get better performance by increasing res.

I don't know how old the screen is, but old screens with low res often have only 30mhz