In terms of overall gaming performance, the AMD Athlon X2 370K is marginally better than the AMD APU A6-6400B Dual-Core 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 Athlon X2 370K was released less than a year after the APU A6-6400B Dual-Core, and so they are likely to have similar levels of support, and similarly optimized performance when running the latest games.

The APU A6-6400B Dual-Core and the Athlon X2 370K both have 2 cores, and so are quite likely to struggle with the latest games, or at least bottleneck high-end graphics cards when running them. With a decent accompanying GPU, the APU A6-6400B Dual-Core and the Athlon X2 370K may still be able to run slightly older games fairly effectively.

Both the AMD APU A6-6400B Dual-Core and the AMD Athlon X2 370K have the same number of threads. Both CPUs have one thread per physical core.

Multiple threads are useful for improving the performance of multi-threaded applications. Additional cores and their accompanying thread will always be beneficial for multi-threaded applications. Hyperthreading will be beneficial for applications optimized for it, but it may slow others down. For games, the number of threads is largely irrelevant, as long as you have at least 2 cores (preferably 4), and hyperthreading can sometimes even hit performance.

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 APU A6-6400B Dual-Core and the Athlon X2 370K are from the same family of CPUs, and thus their clock speeds are directly comparable. With this in mind, it is safe to say that with a 0.1 GHz faster base clock rate, the Athlon X2 370K manages to provide marginally better performance than the APU A6-6400B Dual-Core. What is more, the Athlon X2 370K also manages to eke 0.1 GHz higher frequency when being stressed by CPU-intensive applications.

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 APU A6-6400B Dual-Core and the Athlon X2 370K have the same L2 cache size, and neither CPU appears to have an L3 cache. In this case, the APU A6-6400B Dual-Core has a 32 KB bigger L1 cache, so would probably provide better performance than the Athlon X2 370K, at least 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.

Both the APU A6-6400B Dual-Core and the Athlon X2 370K have the same TDP of 65 Watts, and were created with the same manufacturing size of 32 nm, which means they will affect your yearly electricity bill about equally.

The APU A6-6400B Dual-Core 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 Athlon X2 370K, 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 Radeon HD 8470D, 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.