In terms of overall gaming performance, the AMD APU E2-3200 is very slightly better than the AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 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 APU E2-3200 was released over three years more recently than the Athlon 64 FX-53, and so the APU E2-3200 is likely to have far better levels of support, and will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Athlon 64 FX-53 when running the latest games.

The APU E2-3200 has 1 more core than the Athlon 64 FX-53. However, while the APU E2-3200 will probably perform better than the Athlon 64 FX-53, 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 APU E2-3200 and Athlon 64 FX-53 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 APU E2-3200 and the Athlon 64 FX-53 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 APU E2-3200 and the Athlon 64 FX-53 have the same L2 cache size, and neither CPU appears to have an L3 cache. In this case, the APU E2-3200 has a 128 KB bigger L1 cache, so would probably provide better performance than the Athlon 64 FX-53, 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.

The APU E2-3200 has a 24 Watt lower Maximum TDP than the Athlon 64 FX-53, and was created with a 98 nm smaller manufacturing technology. What this means is the APU E2-3200 will consume significantly less power and consequently produce less heat, enabling more prolonged computational tasks with fewer adverse effects. This will lower your yearly electricity bill significantly, as well as prevent you from having to invest in extra cooling mechanisms (unless you overclock).

The APU E2-3200 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 64 FX-53, 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 6370D, 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.