
Three different WinZip tests give us plenty of data to pore over.
We’re sorting by the outcome of the CPU test, in red. There, the dual-core Pentium and dual-module Athlon, both overclocked, achieve a similar result slightly behind a much more expensive Core i3-4330.
When you push maximum compression using the –ez switch, AMD falters. Intel’s overclocked Pentium basically ties the Core i3, and both best the tweaked Athlon X4 750K by almost 15%.
Our OpenCL-accelerated test doesn’t punish AMD as severely as our Photoshop-based test did. Then again, work is only offloaded to the GeForce card when a file larger than 8 MB needs to be compressed, so the API isn’t in play throughout this benchmark.

Overclocking benefits both AMD and Intel, though the Pentium’s architecture appears better-suited to WinRAR right out of the gate. Even at 4.3 GHz, the Athlon X4 750K can’t match a stock Pentium G3258.

The tables turn in 7-Zip, where the overclocked Pentium cannot touch AMD’s stock Athlon X4 750K. 7-Zip is well-known to lean heavily on available cores/threads, and the more parallelized architectures leave Intel’s dual-core solution in the dust.
- 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.