In terms of overall gaming performance, the AMD Opteron 8212 HE is noticeably better than the AMD Sempron 3300+ 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 8212 HE was released over a year more recently than the Sempron 3300+, and so the Opteron 8212 HE is likely to have better levels of support, and will be more optimized for running the latest games.

The Opteron 8212 HE has 1 more core than the Sempron 3300+. However, while the Opteron 8212 HE will probably perform better than the Sempron 3300+, both CPUs are likely to struggle with the latest games, and will almost certainly bottleneck high-end graphics cards. Both CPUs also have quite low clock frequencies, which means recent games will have to be played at low settings, assuming you own an equivalently powerful GPU.

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 8212 HE and Sempron 3300+ 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 8212 HE and the Sempron 3300+ 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 Opteron 8212 HE has a 896 KB bigger L2 cache than the Sempron 3300+, but neither of the CPUs have L3 caches, so the Opteron 8212 HE wins out in this area with its larger L2 cache.

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 Sempron 3300+ has a 9 Watt lower Maximum TDP than the Opteron 8212 HE (though they were created with the same size 90 nm manufacturing technology). What this means is the Sempron 3300+ 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).