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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
96 Comments
View All Comments
Computer Bottleneck - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link
Regarding cooling at slightly slower OC Pentium G3258 speeds, please read this Anandtech thread:http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=23910...
Also for Non-Z overclocking Pentium G3258, please see this thread:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=23899...
xrror - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link
You will never see an i3-K from Intel because that would actually be popular/useful enough for the "average buyer" to seriously consider one.OR IF Intel did release one, it would be (over)priced to be so close to an i5 that you wouldn't bother with the "risk" of clocking one.
I would absolutely love to be proven wrong mind you, but yea. Pentium-AE is so crippled it's painfully cynical.
boozed - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link
"Aside from the awkward/inaccurate scaling on the slide shown"I call it either deliberately misleading or absolutely ridiculous. They should know better.
Spoelie - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
So all benchmarks were run at 1333 memory speed? Was it not possible to reach a higher speed?It seems that at least for some benchmarks, it would've made quite the difference. Anyone bothering to overclock this one will want to overclock the memory as well.
Torpe - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
Hello Ian. Do you have any Quick Sync data on this CPU? I'm looking at upgrading from my E8400@3.6, which does everything I need well except compress Blu-Ray in a timely manner. Thank you.jamescox - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
I don't think I would recommend one of these to anyone for a low-end gaming machine. With DX12 being able to take better advantage of multiple threads, the low-end for gaming probably should be 4 threads. With xbox one and ps4 both using a low single thread performance, 8 thread cpu, I would expect to see a lot more optimization aimed at 4 to 8 threads. I doubt these low-end chips have sufficient caches and other resources to effectively support multi-threading. I wonder if turning on vector extensions would use too much cache also. The vector extensions should be getting less use anyway, since almost anything that could make good use of the vector extensions would run faster on a gpu.Laststop311 - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
too many bottlenecks, the i5-4670k is still the gold standard for gaming performance and value.Casecutter - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
Oh very nice thanks!Mayuyu - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
I must be really unlucky. My G3258 isn't even stable at 3.7 Ghz at 1.2V. The best I can do is 3.6Ghz at 1.1V.C.C. - Sunday, July 27, 2014 - link
You are doing something wrong, or that is a defective chip. I would RMA it (if that doesn't bother your moral code like it does some people).