In terms of overall gaming performance, the AMD Opteron 6204 is noticeably better than the Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz when it comes to running the latest games. This also means it will be less likely to bottleneck more powerful GPUs, allowing them to achieve more of their gaming performance potential.

The Opteron 6204 was released over three years more recently than the Core 2 Duo, and so the Opteron 6204 is likely to have far better levels of support, and will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Core 2 Duo when running the latest games.

The Opteron 6204 has 2 more cores than the Core 2 Duo. With 4 cores, the Opteron 6204 is much less likely to struggle with the latest games, or bottleneck high-end graphics cards when running them.

More important for gaming than the number of cores and threads is the clock rate. Problematically, unless the two CPUs are from the same family, this can only serve as a general guide and nothing like an exact comparison, because the clock cycles per instruction (CPI) will vary so much.

The Opteron 6204 and Core 2 Duo are not from the same family of CPUs, so their clock speeds are by no means directly comparable. Bear in mind, then, that while the Opteron 6204 has a 0.14 GHz faster frequency, this is not always an indicator that it will be superior in performance, despite frequency being crucial when trying to avoid GPU bottlenecking. As such, we need to look elsewhere for more reliable comparisons.

Aside from the clock rate, the next-most important CPU features for PC game performance are L2 and L3 cache size. Faster than RAM, the more cache available, the more data that can be stored for lightning-fast retrieval. L1 Cache is not usually an issue anymore for gaming, with most high-end CPUs eking out about the same L1 performance, and L2 is more important than L3 - but L3 is still important if you want to reach the highest levels of performance. Bear in mind that although it is better to have a larger cache, the larger it is, the higher the latency, so a balance has to be struck.

The Core 2 Duo has a 5120 KB bigger L2 cache than the Opteron 6204, and although the Core 2 Duo does not appear to have an L3 cache, its larger L2 cache means that it wins out in this area.

The System Bus Speed is important for providing higher bandwidth, and with higher bandwidth the system has the capacity to move more data over a certain time period than it would with lower bandwidth.

The Opteron 6204 has a 5067 MHz faster System Bus Speed than the Core 2 Duo, and as such, has a massively higher limit when it comes to the size of the data being processed at once.

The maximum Thermal Design Power is the power in Watts that the CPU will consume in the worst case scenario. The lithography is the semiconductor manufacturing technology being used to create the CPU - the smaller this is, the more transistors that can be fit into the CPU, and the closer the connections. For both the lithography and the TDP, it is the lower the better, because a lower number means a lower amount of power is necessary to run the CPU, and consequently a lower amount of heat is produced.

The Core 2 Duo has a 50 Watt lower Maximum TDP than the Opteron 6204. However, the Opteron 6204 was created with a 13 nm smaller manufacturing technology. Overall, by taking both into account, the Core 2 Duo is likely the CPU with the lower heat production and power requirements, by quite a wide margin.