William_the_bloody, have a look in you BIOS with regard to the manufacturer's specs for the hardware.  I gained a huge improvement by just matching the RAM speed and timings.  Also, go ahead and raise the multiplier for the CPU, these Phenoms love to overclock.  I'm running 4.0 GHz on air right now.  Gonna go much higher as soon as I get around to building a water cooling loop with an active heat exchanger.  But I digress.

 As to the Phenoms being older tech, that is definitely true.  I noticed the Phenom doesn't run much faster than my older Athlon II (also optimized and O/C'ed) with day-to-day stuff, but they run fast enough that the CPU isn't the bottleneck, usually it was load times from the drive.  But I stuck with AMD because dollar-for-dollar the brute strength of 6 real cores added with the overclock headroom seemed more beneficial than the Intel tricks to beat benchmarks.  Use the "Render Firefly" script and don't go nuts with settings like pixel samples and light bounces and your render times should go down.  Running the CPU faster than the Athlon and having the extra cores really helped me with multi-threaded activities like rendering.  Also, as far as I know, rendering is the ONLY thing Poser does multi-threaded.  Also, leave your render threads at 6.  Since the Phenoms aren't hyperthreaded, any threads over 6 will have to wait until the first ones are finished.  I found that actually slowed me down a bit.  Good luck!