Is this proccesor even worse than the one i had?

HI GUYS, im new here. First of all nice site.

Not long ago I changed my processor and motherboard, i had amd athlon de 3ghz cada core(dualcore).
I then decided to make a little upgrade and i bought PROCESADOR AMD PHENOM QUAD CORE HD9650 2.3 GHZ 4MB. This is my gamming pc and i normaly play mw2, lately my pc kinda goes slower with this new processor plaing the game at max, with the older processor it worked much better. Is the one i bought worse than the one i had?
My friend said that some processors have energy saving thing that doesnt allow the processor work at max, how can i chagne it? He also said that there is a program to optimize quad cores? I need somehelp to make this processor work better. Many thanks

It is slower clock for clock, but can do more at one time since it has 4 cores. So for MW2 yes it will be slower, but for other games that actually use more than 1 core it will be much faster.

Is there anyway I can make it work better or faster for gamming or should i just take it back to the shop and use the old one?

If you play a game like Crysis, Supereme commander or any of the source games since the orange box you will be using 2 cores out of 4. Games like MW2, like Cheator said, only uses 1 core so it's dependant on clock speed not the number of cores you have.
To get the most out of it you need to play a quad core game. Try GTA IV (If your old enough of coarse) and you should see quite a hefty performance increase.

There is nothing you can do if an app or game can't utilize 2 cores 1 core 4 cores 80 cores and so on, that's on the software developers hands.

So if you have a slower cpu now, SOL I doubt its going to make that big of a difference over all though.

You could always overclock... I think that chip goes up to 3.6 on air (can't confirm this)

What motherboard are you using?

my motherboard is ASUS m3n78-vm. If i overclock it, will it be faster than the old one on mw2? Many thanks, you guys are very kind

You can likely Overclock that processor to close to the same speed as your dual core fairly easily, Of course the main thing is making sure you have adequate cooling. (Watch those temps)
Here is a link to get you familiar with O.C.ing your rig. Instead of returning your processor I would give it a shot, It doesn't cost anything but the time you are willing to put into it.

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=555058

I would def recommend you overclock that processor , you should be able to minimum get it to 2.8ghz and that will help quite a bit. you might even be able to squeeze 3.0 ghz out of it.

Well since the game U wanna play is using 1 core so nothing else U can do except OC the processor, dont forgot to change the HSF if U wanna fly high.