Just out of plain curiosity
This isnt a problem, so i hope this is in the right place.
Anyway,
I go to canyourunit.com to see if i can run a few games
and this is what it came back with on my CPU.

http://i25.tinypic.com/w1b8xy.jpg

a 1.5GHz CPU rated at 2.3GHz???
what does that mean exactly,
its actual rating is 1.5 but it runs like a 2.3?
id love to know, thanks in advance :)

do you have dual core?
and, is your processor overclocked?

dual core will actually give a rating of "2.79 Ghz for an effective speed of 5.** ghz"

No, just a plain ol Pentium 4

is it Hyperthreading?

I dont believe it is, they didnt have HT when they made 1.5GHz P4's i think.

Is it overclocked?

its overclocked to 1.58 GHz from its normal 1.50
but i didnt do that, the board did somehow.
but still that wouldnt lead to 2.36GHz performance, would it?

The clock speed is the clock speed - OC'd or not. The performance is a comparison of "effective performance" so that different architectures can be compared performance-wise.

AMD processors have for a long time been more efficient per cycle and so usually get quoted both with their actual speed and their equivalent intel performance rating; (my own AMD results are shown below and for a standard non-OC'd 1.81GHz CPU should be self-explanatory).

I think with hyperthreading and multi-core and so on that, once again, the measurable clock speed is perhaps even less and less significant to what an actual processor can process.

Perhaps they use their own standard as a yardstick or else there is some other standard (standard Intel ??) that all "work done" is compared to.

Guidelines (http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/index.htm)

The processor number is not a measurement of performance, nor is it the only factor to consider when selecting a processor.
The digits themselves have no inherent meaning, particularly when looking across processor families. For instance, 840 is not "better" than 640 simply because 8 is greater than 6.
Furthermore, linear increments between processor numbers may not indicate linear feature advancements. For example, the differences in processor features between an Intel® Pentium® M processor 760 and an Intel® Pentium® M processor 765 will not be the same as between an Intel® Pentium® M processor 765 and an Intel® Pentium® M processor 770, even though both pairs of processors are separated by an increment of five digits.
Processor numbers do not represent specific system configurations and do not replace system-level benchmarks.

Ah there you go! Thanks Paul, that seems to cover it nicely.
so its just running on raw MHz clock to clock performance, i see
thanks again :)