Pentium availability

Astrowind

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 28, 2018
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I was thinking of buying a temporary mobo/cpu/ram/ssd when support ends for Win7 while I wait for PCIe5 to come out. So, I figured to save money, I could buy a Pentium CPU, 8GB of RAM and 240GB M.2 SSD. But, I checked web sites for the fun of it and saw Pentiums are out of stock in Canada. (I mean like the G5400 for $90 Canadian.)

My question is, does this happen often and have Pentiums become a sort of limited edition run kind of CPU?

(By the way, my research showed that a Celeron and 4GB of RAM might be a bit slow for the small difference in price.)
 
They aren’t usually in that high of demand at least here in the US. I can find them cheap online as well as in stores here. Canada May be different.
 
Wow! I just found a cool comparison benchmark video between the Athlon 200ge vs Ryzen 3 2200g vs Pentium g5400 vs i3 8100:
 
The Athlon 200GE doesn't seem too bad for the price if the Pentium G5400 isn't available.

I looked at some benchmarks like G5400 vs i3-8100, i3-8100 vs i3-8400 and i3-8400 vs i5-9400. I figured from the G5400 to the i5-9400, the difference is probably +40% in games.
However, I estimated from benchmarks the Celeron G3930 is probably only half as powerful as the G5400. I thought I had found a bargain when I saw the G3930 on sale for $40 Canadian. I guess it's not much of a bargain.
 
The Athlon 200GE doesn't seem too bad for the price if the Pentium G5400 isn't available.

It's a bit of fun to OC as well. I have one as a placeholder in an itx system and i was surprised how happy i was with it for light gaming/web browser/etc.
 
OK, I read Intel does have a shortage of processors. They invested in new equipment but it's going to take months to reduce/eliminate the shortage. A result of this has been more PCs shipping with AMD CPUs and of course, the lower end has been a bit neglected. Now I can see where the Pentium shortage comes from.

It's going to be interesting how this gets resolved. I mean they want to ramp up 14nm manufacturing while planning to release 10nm later this year then 7nm soon after that. As a matter of fact, after Ice Lake comes out, Tiger Lake is expected to follow soon after that. lol it sounds hard to believe. The only thing I wonder about is which platform is getting PCI Express 5.
 
Intel has kinda sacrificed their lower end lineup production wise to focus on high margin stuff. Makes business sense, but sucks for most consumers.

What's the big draw of PCIe 5.0 for you? Historically, PCIe bandwidth hasn't been a huge factor in gaming performance, and I can't think of any common workloads that will max out a PCIe 4.0 16x lane right now.
 
AMD is releasing two more Athlon models as well.

Also they are releasing more Ryzen 5 and 3s.

And pcie5? We dont even have 4 yet barely as it's so new. You planning to sit on a 50 dollar chip for another 10 years?
 
Yup, the earliest you will see PCIe 4 is 6 months to a year. And we've only just begun to saturate PCIe3.0 x4 slots at 1080p.

relative-performance_1920-1080.png


You can see there's just a 3% gap between 8x and 16x, meaning the performance is virtually identical.

I wouldn't wait. Today's 6 to 8 core processors have more than enough performance to handle gaming for the next 5 years. And the 16x slots will also hold-up well (assuming you don't run SLI) for the next five years.
 
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Well, I read PCIe5 is coming out either next year or the next. My reasoning is if they come out with SSD with PCIe5 speed and with RAM continuing to speed up I'm guessing it will give awesome performance.
 
Well, I read PCIe5 is coming out either next year or the next. My reasoning is if they come out with SSD with PCIe5 speed and with RAM continuing to speed up I'm guessing it will give awesome performance.

Do you do anything besides play games with your SSDs?

If so, we've already hit the load speed benefits wall with SATA6. Game load times, as well as most application load times are now PROCESSOR-LIMITED.

https://techreport.com/review/34266/crucial-p1-500-gb-qlc-nvme-ssd-reviewed/5

Unless you expect to be copying a ton of files on a regular basis between drives, or running some pro-tier workstation applications, you're headed straight into the overkill with PCIe 3.0 nvme. So why do you desire 5.0?

Most gamers go with SATA6 large SSD for game installs, and only bother with NVME for the OS "just because," or if they're the rare user of heavy applications.

You only hit the bandwidth wall of PCIe 3.0 NVME if you you're running a database server, or you're doing 4k video editing, or doing large compiles on server-grade processors. And that's saying nothing for gamers.

The real push for PCIE 5.0 is in servers. Even with as many lanes as they typically have, it's possible to run out of bandwidth. Everything consumer-level has just been about convincing folks they need to spend $$$$$$$$$$$$$$ on a pointless nvme drive so they can win the latest benchmark.

If you buy a PCIe 3.0 system today, and hypothetically five years from now games finally use all sixteen CPU threads and you hit the SATA6 bandwidth limit, and are bandwidth-hungry again, you can put in an Nvme SSD to upgrade your SATA6 drive and more than quadruple your game-load performance. That is how future-proof nVME PCIe 3.0 4x slot already is FOR GAMERS.

YOUR CPU WILL BE OUTDATED BEFORE YOUR NVMe x4 SSD SLOT WILL BE.
 
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Not to mention most current NVMe SSDs are only running 4x lanes, not the full 16x. If bandwidth was that big of an issue for consumers you'd see a ton of 16x SSDs.
 
OK, I read Intel does have a shortage of processors. They invested in new equipment but it's going to take months to reduce/eliminate the shortage. A result of this has been more PCs shipping with AMD CPUs and of course, the lower end has been a bit neglected. Now I can see where the Pentium shortage comes from.

It's going to be interesting how this gets resolved. I mean they want to ramp up 14nm manufacturing while planning to release 10nm later this year then 7nm soon after that. As a matter of fact, after Ice Lake comes out, Tiger Lake is expected to follow soon after that. lol it sounds hard to believe. The only thing I wonder about is which platform is getting PCI Express 5.

Intel has a major CPU Shortage.

I have confirmation from several of our suppliers that system builders are seeing 2-4 weeks before systems are shipping with any 8th Gen CPU. This is from the big integrator companies, Dell, HP, etc.
 
I got a Athlon 200GE for like $40 to try.

I think you should go that route.
 
Just announced G5620, 4.0 ghz- 2 core/4thread ..and a few others

Oh, let's see how available they are. lol (Actually, I'm not being insensitive to their current situation. I can wait if I wanted to do it. It was just an idea I was contemplating.)

Interesting though that the G5400 (and G5500 & G5600) have hyper-threading. Only some CPUs like the i7 8700 have hyper-threading.

EDIT: I was looking up G5620 in Google and found this...
 
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Intel's modern Pentiums have always served zero purpose. They have the same core/thread count as the Celeron, with the same lack of AVX, same cut-down GPU, but they cost $20-30 more, all for a 10% clock bump.

But two years back, Intel was anticipating Raven Ridge, and wanted to own the market BEFORE AMD ever arrived. So the Kaby Lake Pentium got HT, and was a huge success...until Intel couldn't meet demand.

So much for owning the market. You can't even buy the new Coffee Lake Celerons for their old MSRP of $40 (the lowest I've seen is $55), but the 200GE and 2200g are available.
 
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Intel's modern Pentiums have always served zero purpose.

I was waiting for someone to say something like this and it happened. I'll tell you why I can't completely agree with that. The benchmarks I've seen show the i3-6100 about 10% slower than an i5-4570 in games. These are the CPUs I use in my main machine and backup (which I use often to watch movies/documentaries). My i3-6100 believe it or not, is more than adequate for watching movies, video chat rooms etc. As a matter of fact, I was even able to use Bluestacks (Android emulator) and could watch live.me video chat rooms full screen. (I had to click on virtualization in the BIOS.) As a matter of fact, I was very relieved when I built that machine to replace my old Athlon 5400+ dual-core. That machine even after scanning for viruses was struggling just to open and close web pages. It was a pain.

The point about my i5-4570 and i3-6100 is that from benchmarks I've seen, the Pentium G5400 is maybe 5% faster than the i3-6100 which means it's almost as powerful as my i5-4570. The reason I had considered a Pentium is because I was thinking if I wanted to build a temporary machine waiting for Intel Ice Lake, I wanted something that would allow me to be reasonably satisfied while I'm waiting for Ice Lake and allow me to sell it later on eBay. I mean if I had 8GB of RAM and a 250GB (or 500GB) SSD, I could easily sell a mobo/CPU/RAM/M2.SSD combo on eBay.

I agree though that people shouldn't bother with the Celeron. I researched this after seeing a Celeron for $40 Canadian on clearance. But in one benchmark I saw it was literally averaging like 15fps while other CPUs go from 50fps to 90fps. In other words, if the Pentium was at 50fps, the i5 CPUs in the 70fps range and the i7 and i9 in the top range. At least the Pentium would allow you to run a modern game. My old Athlon 5400+ probably wouldn't even be able to launch a modern game.

Besides, when looking at availability and prices, right now bhphotovideo has the Pentium G4560 for $70 US (and they ship to Canada). I know Dell in Canada has reasonable prices for complete desktops with Intel CPUs (even though Bestbuy and Staples don't seem to have the same suppliers).
 
I was waiting for someone to say something like this and it happened. I'll tell you why I can't completely agree with that.

You didn't even read the rest of my post. I already talked about the Pentium growing up.

With Coffee Lake, Pentium replaced Core i3, Core i3 replaced Core i5, and Core i5 6 cores replaced Core i5 4-core.

Before that, it served no fucking purpose, except to trick idiots into spending more than $45 on a dual-core dual-thread processor. That is why the Coffee Lake Celeron is unchanged: because there was previously no difference between it and the Pentium, except clock speed.
 
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I don't know how much it would be to ship to Canada but I have a G3258 lying around that you can have for cheap.
 
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