Hm. Yeah I thought it was odd that I am getting such low FPS. AA is 2x, made no difference. Vsync is off, also made no difference. GPU utilization seems ok, it's at the right clock speed. Processor is an i5-3570k OC at around 3.4 Ghz.
My system should be able to run this no problem, and yet it struggles. I will try 64 bit, that will hopefully help with the crashing.