In terms of overall gaming performance, the AMD Opteron 4174 HE is marginally better than the Intel Core i5-650 3.2GHz 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 4174 HE was released less than a year after the Core i5-650 3.2GHz, and so they are likely to have similar levels of support, and similarly optimized performance when running the latest games.

The Opteron 4174 HE has 4 more cores than the Core i5-650 3.2GHz. With 6 cores, the Opteron 4174 HE 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 4174 HE and Core i5-650 3.2GHz 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 Core i5-650 3.2GHz has a 0.9 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. In this case, however, the difference is probably a good indicator that the Opteron 4174 HE is superior.

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 Opteron 4174 HE and the Core i5-650 3.2GHz have the same L2 cache size, but the Opteron 4174 HE has a 2 MB bigger L3 cache, so in this area, it wins out over the Core i5-650 3.2GHz.

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 Opteron 4174 HE has a 8 Watt lower Maximum TDP than the Core i5-650 3.2GHz. However, the Core i5-650 3.2GHz was created with a 13 nm smaller manufacturing technology. Overall, by taking both into account, the Core i5-650 3.2GHz is likely the CPU with the lower heat production and power requirements, by a small amount.

The Core i5-650 3.2GHz has an on-board GPU, which means that it will be capable of running basic graphics applications (i.e., games) without the need for a dedicated graphics card. The Opteron 4174 HE, however, does not, and you will probably have to look for a dedicated card if you wish to use it at all.

For in-depth GPU comparisons with the HD i5 650, click on the following GPU overview comparison icon (visible throughout Game-Debate), and choose a GPU from the list to compare against:

On-board GPUs tend to be fairly awful in comparison to dedicated cards from the likes of AMD or Nvidia, but as they are built into the CPU, they also tend to be cheaper and require far less power to run (this makes them a good choice for laptops). We would recommend a dedicated card for running the latest games, but integrated GPUs are improving all the time and casual gamers may find less recent games perform perfectly acceptably.