In terms of overall gaming performance, the AMD Sempron 150 is very slightly better than the Intel Pentium D 820 2.8GHz 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 Sempron 150 was released over three years more recently than the Pentium D 820, and so the Sempron 150 is likely to have far better levels of support, and will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Pentium D 820 when running the latest games.

The Pentium D 820 has 1 more core than the Sempron 150. However, while the Pentium D 820 will probably perform better than the Sempron 150, both CPUs are likely to struggle with the latest games, and will almost certainly bottleneck high-end graphics cards. This should not affect games that are a few years old, and even the latest games should at least be playable on very low settings, as only recently have game developers begun to harness the power of multiple cores.

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 Sempron 150 and Pentium D 820 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 Sempron 150 has a 0.1 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. 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 Pentium D 820 has a 1024 KB bigger L2 cache than the Sempron 150, but neither of the CPUs have L3 caches, so the Pentium D 820 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 150 has a 50 Watt lower Maximum TDP than the Pentium D 820, and was created with a 45 nm smaller manufacturing technology. What this means is the Sempron 150 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).