
With that small library of games benchmarked, I’m not sure there’s much more we could learn from a synthetic. However, there actually is some useful information to digest.
First, let’s look at the Graphics score. Typically, you’d expect this to be even from top to bottom, as Futuremark effectively shifts as much processing to the GPU as possible. And yet, while the Core i5, i3, and overclocked Pentium demonstrate fairly similar scores, the Athlon is a bit slower, and the stock Pentium G3258 downright hobbles a GeForce GTX Titan. Don’t be bothered by this; nobody’s going to pair a £55 CPU and £900 graphics card. Still, even in a synthetic, it’s impossible to overcome that gross imbalance.
Shift focus over to the Physics suite, intended to isolate CPU performance. Futuremark reflects the superiority of four physical cores in a threading-optimized game by giving Intel’s Core i5 a big advantage. The Core i3 is a dual-core chip; however, it employs Hyper-Threading to schedule four threads, and so it claims a second-place finish. AMD employs a dual-module design with four integer units and a lot of shared resources. At a stock 3.4 GHz, it finishes second-to-last. But overclocking to 4.3 GHz yields third place. The dual-core, no-frills Pentium gets hammered in stock form, and picks up a spot once it’s overclocked.
The overall score blends the outcomes. Except for the Core i5 and i3, those red bars don’t really do a good job forecasting real-world performance. However, we like to think of synthetics as better gauges of a future where everything is maximally optimized, and that’d take more emphasis on multi-core CPUs in games.

We enter the realm of performance on the desktop outside of gaming with a PCMark chart. The Core i3 is missing because it repeatedly failed this benchmark.
Stock, Intel’s Pentium G3258 roughly ties the overclocked Athlon, while tuning takes the Pentium up several notches. It remains to be seen if these numbers translate over to our benchmark suite.

The Fritz chess benchmark puts a pointed emphasis on threading, specifically reflecting the integer performance of these CPUs. As a result, Intel’s Haswell-based Core i5-4690K dominates. It’s followed by AMD’s overclocked Athlon X4 750K, which puts its four integer units to good use. The Core i3 places third. Although it only wields two cores, Hyper-Threading helps keep them fully utilized—so much so, in fact, that a dual-core Pentium G3258 overclocked to 4.5 GHz can’t quite keep up.
- An Enthusiast-Oriented Pentium CPU?
- Overclocking Pentium G3258 And Athlon X4 750K
- How We Tested Intel’s Pentium G3258 And AMD’s Athlon X4 750K
- Results: Arma 3
- Results: Battlefield 4
- Results: Grid 2
- Results: Metro: Last Light
- Results: Thief
- Results: Tomb Raider
- Results: World of Warcraft
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Content Creation
- Results: Adobe CC
- Results: Productivity And Media Encoding
- Results: Compression Apps
- Power Consumption And Efficiency
- Haswell, Unlocked, For £55
dont buy a pc so cheap you cant cool it or have a good motherboard.
When the i3 is £90 and can be put in a cheap (£40) H81 motherboard without needing the effort of finding a stable overclock it seems a bit risky to go for the Pentium.
However, if a later upgrade to an i5K or i7K is planned (or you need the Z series chipset features) then the Pentium is a good way to start saving towards that upgrade while not compromising on the expense of an i3 or drop in performance of a regular Pentium.
Zalman CNPS10X Performa(~35$) or
Thermalright True Spirit 120i(~45$) should be enough to keep it under 80 degrees.
SOURCE:http://www.tomshardware.com/news/asus-overclocking-h87-h97-b85,27076.html
Anything above 4.3Ghz wasn't stable, even with the voltage up to 1.34v (not prepared to try higher than that as temps were too high). This was likely down to the cheap mobo, but I'm not going to complain about that, as it's still a nice overclock for the money.