This also means it will be less likely to bottleneck more powerful GPUs, allowing them to achieve more of their gaming performance potential.

The E5700 3GHz was released less than a year after the E5500 2.8GHz, and so they are likely to have similar levels of support, and similarly optimized performance when running the latest games.

The E5700 3GHz and the E5500 2.8GHz 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 E5700 3GHz and the E5500 2.8GHz 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 E5700 3GHz and the E5500 2.8GHz are from the same family of CPUs, and thus their clock speeds are directly comparable.

With this in mind, it is safe to say that with a 0.2 GHz faster base clock rate, the E5700 3GHz manages to provide slightly better performance than the E5500 2.8GHz.

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 E5700 3GHz and the E5500 2.8GHz have the same L2 cache size, and neither CPU appears to have an L3 cache.

They even have the same L1 cache size, so are identical in terms of cache size.

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 processors are based on either the 32-bit Yonah or (with quite different microarchitectures) 64-bit Merom-2M, Allendale, and Wolfdale-3M core, targeted at mobile or desktop computers.

In terms of features, price and performance at a given clock frequency, Pentium Dual-Core processors were positioned above Celeron but below Core and Core 2 microprocessors in Intels product range.

The Pentium Dual-Core was also a very popular choice for overclocking, as it can deliver optimal performance (when overclocked) at a low price.

The Pentium Dual-Core brand was used for mainstream x86-architecture microprocessors from Intel from 2006 to 2009 when it was renamed to Pentium.

Intel Pentium E5700 Processor Specs