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Intel Pentium G3258 CPU Review: Haswell, Unlocked, For £55
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You wouldn’t expect a straight-up dual-core Pentium to hang with a Hyper-Threaded Core i3 and overclocked dual-module Athlon X4, but there it is.

Again, though, just look at the Core i5 in comparison. And that’s a 3.5 GHz CPU with 800 or 900 MHz of additional headroom available. A quad-core Haswell-based chip (or better) is the way to go when you’re doing heavy lifting.

The same conclusions apply to After Effects. Yes, overclocking does wonders for the Pentium G3258. But Intel’s Core i5 is so much faster. You can shave off 56% of the Pentium’s overclocked result by going with a stock Core i7-4790K if rendering performance really matters to you.

This chart reflects a pair of benchmarks, which need to be looked at separately.

If you run a lot of threaded filters, the red bars matter most. They show Intel’s Pentium G3258 and AMD’s Athlon X4 750K pretty much tied in their stock form. Overclocking helps them both quite a bit, and they both leap past Intel’s £100+ Core i3-4330. The extra clock rate favors Intel’s Pentium a little more, though. No matter—if you’re an artist, strongly consider spending more on a quad-core CPU. The Core i5’s finish illustrates why.

Our OpenCL-accelerated numbers are far more problematic for AMD. The Intel CPUs get subtle speed-ups as we shift from stock Pentium to Core i3 to overclocked Pentium, and finally the Core i5. But the overclocked Athlon is 87% slower than the overclock Pentium. Based on what we’ve seen thus far, and knowing this test offloads work to the GeForce card, we have to imagine there’s an issue keeping Nvidia’s GK110 GPU fed on AMD’s platform. The A85X platform only supports PCI Express 2.0, but it’s hard to imagine transfer rates across the PCIe bus making this much difference.

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  • 0 Hide
    tea urchin , 17 June 2014 08:14
    Been waiting reviews for a 'sister' build. Thanks.
  • -1 Hide
    Plusthinking Iq , 17 June 2014 12:10
    this beat every amd up to amd 8350, and still you need to oc the 8350 to get better fps in some games. this pretty much leaves amd dead in the water in gaming cpu's
  • 4 Hide
    Blahman11 , 17 June 2014 13:21
    This is a very good CPU for the price, AMD should be worried, and in fact everyone should. This CPU is pretty much removing for AMD one of their last areas in which AMD did well- cheap overclockable CPUs. AMD need to respond to this, perhaps make a GPU disabled kaveri chip that overclocks better than the 7850k does? If AMD don't respond then we lose the last competitor to intel, and everyone knows what that would mean for the market.
  • 3 Hide
    jaslion , 17 June 2014 19:30
    well here in belgium and fx 6300 is 100€ straight and this pentium 75€ so i would go for the fx 6300 personnally
  • 3 Hide
    ivyanev , 19 June 2014 09:30
    correct me if i am wrong but overclocking this processor requires z motherboard, and a pontent cooler. These two combined will add up to more than the difference with the i3. What you end up is hot, overclocked processor that is inferior in almost all benchmarks for no less money. The only logic I can see is to buy this now and after a couple of years upgrade to i7 and overclock it also.
  • -5 Hide
    Plusthinking Iq , 19 June 2014 10:10
    stock cooler should not be used anyways, so your wrong ivyanev.
    dont buy a pc so cheap you cant cool it or have a good motherboard.
  • -2 Hide
    Defconluke , 22 June 2014 09:19
    Minimum of £80 for a low end Z97 motherboard + £55 for the unlocked Pentium with an overclock that is not guaranteed.

    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.
  • 2 Hide
    d1vine , 29 June 2014 10:05
    You dont need an Z series to OC this monster.You need just an "solid" Asus h81/b85/h97 mobo(with al least one heatshrink on the VRM).Asus announced that they will unlock overclocking on their h81/b85/h97 mobos.Plus you don't need a serious cooler,
    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
  • 1 Hide
    TesseractOrion , 8 July 2014 17:10
    Is there a slight anomaly in the Tomb Raider graphs? The OC G3258 appears a lot slower than the normal one...
  • 0 Hide
    Pegasu5 , 16 July 2014 14:54
    4.6Ghz on a H81M-Plus here: http://www.ukgamingcomputers.co.uk/overclocking-pentium-g3258-on-h81-b75-h87-h97-chipsets-a-60.html
  • 0 Hide
    jukkie , 20 July 2014 04:35
    Well, I have my G3258 running at 4.3Ghz at 1.33v on a £30 MSI H81 mobo, coupled with a £15 Freezer 7 pro heatsink/fan. That's only £85 in total for quite a fair amount of performance.

    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.