In terms of overall gaming performance, the Intel Core i5-4690 3.5GHz is massively better than the AMD Opteron 4274 HE 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 Core i5-4690 3.5GHz was released over a year more recently than the Opteron 4274 HE, and so the Core i5-4690 3.5GHz is likely to have better levels of support, and will be more optimized for running the latest games.

Both CPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings (assuming they are accompanied by equivalently powerful GPUs).

The Opteron 4274 HE has 4 more cores than the Core i5-4690 3.5GHz. 8 cores is probably excessive if you mean to just run the latest games, as games are not yet able to harness this many cores. The cores in the Core i5-4690 3.5GHz is more than enough for gaming purposes. However, if you intend on running a server with the Opteron 4274 HE, it would seem to be a decent choice.

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 Core i5-4690 3.5GHz and Opteron 4274 HE 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 i5-4690 3.5GHz has a 1 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 4274 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 Core i5-4690 3.5GHz has a 24 KB bigger L2 cache than the Opteron 4274 HE, but on the other hand, it is the Opteron 4274 HE that has a 2 MB bigger L3 cache than the Core i5-4690 3.5GHz. In this case, the L2 size is probably what counts, so the Core i5-4690 3.5GHz is likely superior 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 Opteron 4274 HE has a 19 Watt lower Maximum TDP than the Core i5-4690 3.5GHz. However, the Core i5-4690 3.5GHz was created with a 10 nm smaller manufacturing technology. Overall, by taking both into account, the Core i5-4690 3.5GHz is likely the CPU with the lower heat production and power requirements, but there really isn't much in it.

The Core i5-4690 3.5GHz 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 4274 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 Intel HD Graphics 4600 Desktop, 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.