The Sandy Bridge Pentium Review: G850, G840, G620 & G620T Tested

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• loeakaodas - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  Why intel, why? Do you still ram these chips down our throats, they're so short of features that would be great for a cheap HTPC, but aren't all that attractive if you want to do anything but basic stuff with your machine.

• Blaze-Senpai - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  And this is aimed at those people that only want to do basic stuff with their machine.

• yankeeDDL - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  It still makes no sense: a Pentium 850 costs $98 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... an A6-3650 costs $119 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
  For $20 you get a real graphic cards which acelerated web browsing and video decoding, so it is actually very useful even for very basic systems.
  
  I see no value, whatsoever, for entry-level Sandy Bridge, as they have a higher price/performance ratio than most AMD stuff.
  
  Incidentally, while SB is undoubtedly the finest piece of CPU technology today, at these prices it makes sense only starting from the Core i5-2400, which, basically, outperforms nearly every AMD CPU.

• ET - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  A G620 plus a discrete low mid range ($70-80) GPU will give you a much better entry level gaming PC than an A6-3650, for not a lot more money. (For about the same price as an A8-3850, which will still be slower for gaming than the G620 system).

• yankeeDDL - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  I am not convinced, but you might be right about the gaming rigs. I would argue that a cheap discrete graphic card would CrossFire nicely with tha A6, but that's not the point anyway.
  
  I was talking, however, about entry-level systems.
  There`s a "Best CPU for the money" update on Tom's hardware today: you can see that the G620 is not even in the picture, in favor of the Athlon II X3 and the G850.
  If I was to play games rarely, I would much rather have an efficient but relatively powerful APU, than having to use an external graphic card: this way I wouldn't have to pay the electricity bill to have my GPU run a screensaver.

• Taft12 - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  Perhaps, but an Athlon II X3 450 plus the same $70-80 GPU would make for an even better entry level gaming PC at the same price.

• lowlymarine - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  Not really. Many games still struggle to hit even two cores efficiently; few if any would benefit significantly from the third.

• Roland00Address - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  For example see Grand Theft Auto IV PC edition. This game is unplayable on a Dual Core pc without a massive overclock, but runs fine on a slow tri or quad core. This was due to Xbox 360 having a tri-core processor (The 360 cpu is also a PowerPC design not x86 but that doesn't really matter.)

• Samus - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link

  great article Anand!

• owned66 - Sunday, February 10, 2013 - link

  most games after 2011
  play very well with multicore systems
  my qx6700 was maxed out at 100% playing bf3
  
  playing with a 2600 sandy maxes out at 85% equally on all cores and gpu maxed at 100% gpu load
  
  increasing gpu clocks would increase cpu load which is a good sign of fine tuning