In terms of overall gaming performance, the AMD Phenom II X4 X920 Black Edition is marginally better than the Intel Pentium Dual Core 3550M 2.3GHz 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 Pentium Dual Core was released over three years more recently than the Phenom II X4, and so the Pentium Dual Core is likely to have far better levels of support, and will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Phenom II X4 when running the latest games.

The Phenom II X4 has 2 more cores than the Pentium Dual Core. With 4 cores, the Phenom II X4 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 Pentium Dual Core and Phenom II X4 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 Pentium Dual Core and the Phenom II X4 both have the same clock frequency, this is by no means an indicator that the two CPUs will provide the same level of performance. 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 Phenom II X4 has a 1024 KB bigger L2 cache than the Pentium Dual Core, and although the Phenom II X4 does not appear to have an L3 cache, its larger L2 cache means that it wins out in this area.

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 Pentium Dual Core has a 8 Watt lower Maximum TDP than the Phenom II X4, and was created with a 23 nm smaller manufacturing technology. What this means is the Pentium Dual Core will consume slightly less power and consequently produce less heat, enabling more prolonged computational tasks with fewer adverse effects. This will lower your yearly electricity bill slightly, as well as prevent you from having to invest in extra cooling mechanisms (unless you overclock).