
Processor performance matters at the highest detail settings of Thief, too. In this case, however, even the stock Pentium outperforms AMD’s overclocked Athlon X4 750K. As far as averages go, tweaking the Pentium pushes performance above Intel’s Core i3-4330, though that Hyper-Threading-enabled CPU achieves a slightly higher minimum frame rate.

Tracking performance over time, it’s easy to gauge the impact of overclocking on Intel’s unlocked Pentium and AMD’s Athlon X4.

Intel’s Pentium G3258 registers the highest frame time variance in Thief, and you can see a handful of big spikes in the variance over time chart below.
This outcome is particularly interesting since the frame rate figures in the two previous charts suggested such good behavior from the Pentium. What we see here instead suggests the dual-core, non-Hyper-Threaded processor suffers incurs more quantifiable stuttering, even paired to a very fast GeForce GTX Titan, compared to the other contenders able to handle four threads.

- 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.