I have a 1.8ghz Athlon 64 3000+. It's already a few years old, and I won't be able to upgrade any time soon. I've had consistent performance problems with this CPU almost since the day I bought it. It's been the bottleneck in every performance-intensive game I've played in the last couple years.

Now, this CPU is supposedly equivalent to a 3ghz Pentium 4, hence the "3000". My experience has been that this isn't remotely the case, but a lot of CPU rankings seem to indicate that. Is there anything I could be doing wrong that might kill game performance with this CPU, in Oblivion and many other games? I know my BIOS is fully unlocked and I'm pretty familiar with all of the settings. I have all of the clock speed and memory settings at defaults, and thermal throttling off. I've gotten the same performance in XP and Win7. There don't seem to be any AMD drivers for Win7 that I can try.

Any specific insight would be REALLY appreciated. Thanks.

When recent games recommend a 3ghz proc they are suggesting a core2/phenom ii.

A 1.8ghz athlon 64 would be roughly equivalent to a 1.5 - 1.6 ghz.