In terms of overall gaming performance, the Intel Celeron G540 2.5GHz is noticeably better than the AMD Athlon II X2 245e 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 Celeron G540 2.5GHz was released over a year more recently than the Athlon II X2, and so the Celeron G540 2.5GHz is likely to have better levels of support, and will be more optimized for running the latest games.

The Celeron G540 2.5GHz and the Athlon II X2 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 Celeron G540 2.5GHz and the Athlon II X2 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 Celeron G540 2.5GHz and Athlon II X2 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 X2 has a 0.4 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 enough that it possibly indicates the superiority of the .

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 X2 has a 1536 KB bigger L2 cache than the Celeron G540 2.5GHz, and although the Athlon II X2 does not appear to have an L3 cache, its larger L2 cache means that it 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 X2 has a 20 Watt lower Maximum TDP than the Celeron G540 2.5GHz. However, the Celeron G540 2.5GHz was created with a 13 nm smaller manufacturing technology. Overall, by taking both into account, the Celeron G540 2.5GHz is likely the CPU with the lower heat production and power requirements, but there really isn't much in it.