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Results: Productivity And Media Encoding

Intel Pentium G3258 CPU Review: Haswell, Unlocked, For £55
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Presumably, ABBYY’s FineReader 11 makes extensive use of AMD’s integer units, as the Athlon X4 750K in its stock form bests Intel’s Pentium G3258. And even though we’re not able to get as-aggressive of an overclock out of it, the Athlon scores a second-place finish, just ahead of the Core i3-4330.

As if to illustrate how well-threaded this task is, Intel’s quad-core Core i5 puts the rest of the field to shame, finishing 37% faster than the well-tuned Athlon. And that’s at its stock clock rate. Then again, the -4690K is a £180 processor, 200% pricier than AMD’s X4 750K. This isn’t a bad showing from the budget chips.

The Pentium and Athlon enjoy big gains from overclocking, but can’t catch the Hyper-Threaded Core i3 or quad-core i5 in our Chrome compilation workload.

Intel’s Pentium G3258 takes a last-place finish and turns it into second place with some heavy overclocking. The Athlon fares better than the Pentium at its stock clock rate, and then falls in behind the tuned dual-core chip when we crank clock rates up.

The same situation shakes out in our HandBrake benchmark, only this time, the overclocked Athlon edges out Intel’s £100+ Core i3 to finish third.

Parallelization goes out the window in our LAME workload. A 4.6 GHz Haswell core easily rules this test, trumping the Core i5’s 3.9 GHz maximum Turbo Boost setting. Of course, the K-series CPU can also be readily overclocked, so expect a similar ceiling from that processor.

Unfortunately, AMD gives up a ton of single-core performance due to issues with IPC. A 900 MHz overclock helps the Athlon X4 750K. But even at 4.3 GHz, it can’t catch Intel’s Pentium G3258 at 3.2 GHz.

The same thing happens in iTunes. We won’t dwell on it.

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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.