Tweak guides may help you setting up your machine in a general fashion and to this game in particular. Your CPU is more than enough to run that game (assuming you are not abusing the specs), so, or the machine is very badly configured or there is something very wrong with your mods. About the 8 cores, it's not exactly true but whatever, that game is not optimized to use multicore albeit being able to get some performance boost when correctly configured to use multi threads (you need to enable it editing ini file). PS: I would not be surprised if your problem is actually with "sound", no joking. Try installing third party codecs, K-Lite seen a good choice yet. Hey. I tried disabling the sound in the oblivion.ini config file and it didn't work. Like I said, the problem seems to disappear when 'faces' are removed from the game.