Overclockable Pentium Anniversary Edition Review: The Intel Pentium G3258
by Ian Cutress on July 14, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Pentium
- Overclocking
- Pentium-AE
- G3258
Discrete GPU Gaming
When comparing CPUs to APUs, one strength shown by team Blue in the past is the discrete GPU performance. When using dual graphics cards at a 1920x1080p resolution, at a lower amount of CPU power overall, there tends to be a significant amount of variance when extra CPU performance is applied. While it seems the overclock numbers are nice for a Pentium, a little extra money for an i3 at stock seems to be the choice here.
F1 2013
Bioshock Infinite
Tomb Raider
Sleeping Dogs
Company of Heroes 2
Battlefield 4
All of our titles, except Tomb Raider, get a significant increase from overclocking the CPU. However, it is worth noting (especially in titles such as Battlefield) that using and i3 from the start gets an even better result. This is because the gaming industry has moved on from the last overclockable dual core Intel CPU - games can now take advantage of more cores, and that jump from 2 cores to hyperthreading lets a high end title stretch its legs a little more than a simple overclock.
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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.