Overclockable Pentium Anniversary Edition Review: The Intel Pentium G3258

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• SolarAxix - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link

  On a side note, I will probably be buying another one (or I should say my parents will be getting another one since it's one per household) to upgrade my parents' PC. They've had an i3 530 for about 4 years. It's starting to a bit "slow" for them when they browse some of the newer websites. For $100 plus tax at Microcenter, this would be a nice upgrade for them. It should burn a bit less power, it has a better iGPU, and comes with USB 3. Since they have an external USB 3 HD and flash drives, it will certainly be a benefit to them since they do copy GBs of data back and forth and always ask me if there's a way to make it faster.
  
  Since I'm the one that's taking care of their PC remotely, I don't have an issue with OC a bit and keeping an eye on it.
  
  The bottom line is that for their use-case, I think it's a great step up for a low price.

• Death666Angel - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link

  Since the Nehalem architecture still allows for bckl overclocking, I would try that first. When I had my i3-530 HTPC I ran it at 4.6GHz stable with a cheap tower heatsink (15€).

• mapesdhs - Friday, July 25, 2014 - link

  
  Indeed, though that old i3 is Clarkdale btw, not Nehalem. But yes, I have an i3 550 @ 4.7;
  on a better board it'd probably do 5+.
  
  Ian.

• Computer Bottleneck - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link

  Thanks for the review.
  
  I am just disappointed you didn't test with a 3MB Core i3 (like the $125 i3-4130 or the $130 i3-4150). These are also the processors commonly found in Pre-built PCs which the Pentium G3258 will likely be compared against.
  
  .

• revanchrist - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link

  Lower end i3 (41XX) has 3MB L3 cache while higher end i3 (43XX) has 4MB L3 cache. Fix that in your 1st table.

• JackTheBear - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link

  People keep mentioning the Celeron 300A. This is nothing like a Celeron 300A. Overclocked, the 300A was nearly indistinguishable from the top of the line processor, the PII-450. You overclock this chip and it's still a low end piece of (equipment). When you can overclock a Celeron and have it match an i7, then you can compare it to the Celeron 300A.

• Death666Angel - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link

  They keep mentioning it, but I have not seen anyone state that they are the same or comparable in their respective fields.

• Zan Lynx - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link

  The 300A was crap on anything that needed cache. It worked great for Quake. That was about it.

• Computer Bottleneck - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link

  Also the price difference in the United States (going by Newegg, Amazon, and Tiger direct prices) is a good deal more than the $45 you mentioned in your article:
  
  Pentium G3258:
  $75 at Newegg
  $69 at Amazon
  $75 at Tiger Direct
  
  Core i3-4330:
  $140 at Newegg
  $137 at Amazon
  $140 at Tiger Direct
  
  Using the two Amazon prices for comparison, the price spread between Core i3-4330 and Pentium G3258 is $70. (Comparing Newegg and Tiger Direct prices, the gap only narrows to $65)

• Computer Bottleneck - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link

  Correction, the price difference is $68 using Amazon prices.