In terms of overall gaming performance, the Intel Pentium Dual Core 3550M 2.3GHz is significantly better than the AMD Athlon II N370 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 Pentium Dual Core was released less than a year after the Athlon II N370, and so they are likely to have similar levels of support, and similarly optimized performance when running the latest games.

The Athlon II N370 and the Pentium Dual Core 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 Athlon II N370 and the Pentium Dual Core may still be able to run slightly older games fairly effectively.

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 Athlon II N370 and Pentium Dual Core 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 Athlon II N370 has a 0.2 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 Athlon II N370 and the Pentium Dual Core have the same L2 cache size, but the Athlon II N370 does not appear to have an L3 cache, so the Pentium Dual Core definitely 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 Athlon II N370 has a 2 Watt lower Maximum TDP than the Pentium Dual Core. However, the Pentium Dual Core was created with a 23 nm smaller manufacturing technology. Overall, by taking both into account, the Pentium Dual Core is likely the CPU with the lower heat production and power requirements, by quite a wide margin.