Intel Pentium G3258 Review

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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The fine folks over at Legit Reviews are putting the new K-series Pentium dual core processor through its paces. This is the first multiplier unlocked "low end" processor that we have seen for a long time from Intel. Legit managed a healthy 4.8GHz overclocked speed on this $65 which has a 3.2GHz base clock. And why this is so interesting is because if you are using your PC to mainly play games, most of which are not close to being truly multi-threaded, this processor may be a gaming bargain. Legit got some great results.

Legit Bottom Line: If you’re looking to build a dedicated LAN gaming machine or Steam Box, the Intel Pentium G3258 is a great option for only ~$60-$65. I found it was able to keep up with the Intel Core i7-4770K in most of the games and even come out ahead when it was overclocked!
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I dunno, the review kinda proved that games are GPU bottlenecked at their highest settings, even when using a dual core processor. The overclocking didn't really make a huge difference in most situations since, at the FPS they were hitting, it didn't really matter if the CPU was running at 3.2 or 4.8 GHz or was a dual core or quad core. All of the games were well completely playable so why put the CPU under so much extra, unnecessary stress if the differences are just academic and invisible to the eye/bran?
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
I dunno, the review kinda proved that games are GPU bottlenecked at their highest settings, even when using a dual core processor. The overclocking didn't really make a huge difference in most situations since, at the FPS they were hitting, it didn't really matter if the CPU was running at 3.2 or 4.8 GHz or was a dual core or quad core. All of the games were well completely playable so why put the CPU under so much extra, unnecessary stress if the differences are just academic and invisible to the eye/bran?
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Not to mention that you'll probably need a decent board and cooling to make it work well in the first place. Having this thing be a cheap, OC'ing beast is more expensive than marketing leads us to believe...
 
jbltecnicspro said:
Not to mention that you'll probably need a decent board and cooling to make it work well in the first place. Having this thing be a cheap, OC'ing beast is more expensive than marketing leads us to believe...
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+1 For me, this cpu with a high end board would cost similar to an i5 with a basic B85 board and get similar performance and a little future proof-ness as well.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
I dunno, the review kinda proved that games are GPU bottlenecked at their highest settings, even when using a dual core processor. The overclocking didn't really make a huge difference in most situations since, at the FPS they were hitting, it didn't really matter if the CPU was running at 3.2 or 4.8 GHz or was a dual core or quad core. All of the games were well completely playable so why put the CPU under so much extra, unnecessary stress if the differences are just academic and invisible to the eye/bran?
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I think that's kind of the point of the review. At the settings you want to play the game at generally buying something like the G3258 and sinking as much money as you can in to your video card makes a very respectable gaming machine with today's titles since so much is done on your video card anyway.

This means that for any machine that has any sort of budget (which is pretty much every machine) historically there has been an idea that you should spend about as much on each since many games were CPU bound. This proves that even if you pair the cheap budget gaming CPU with a big tower cooler and a beast of a video card you end up with a rig that can run games at really nice settings.

This means there is no more of this "bottlenecking" questions or balancing issues... if you want a gaming rig you buy a beast video card and if you want an application work horse you buy a beast of a processor, if you want both you buy both and only then would you need to figure out how much budget is going each way.
 
artimusbill said:
+1 For me, this cpu with a high end board would cost similar to an i5 with a basic B85 board and get similar performance and a little future proof-ness as well.
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Keep in mind that Asus has announced the ability to overclock on non-87/97 chipsets... and by the performance charts the huge overclock only helped in a few scenarios. So even if you were to push it to 4.0Ghz for a mild performance boost and a huger video card you still end up with a really capable little gaming machine.
 
Nice write-up.

... although I think I'd miss the extra cores. Wouldn't a quad core, with HT, w/o graphics be nice! :)
 
the funny thing is, in my experience you really can do a lot with overclocking by going with a good $100-150 board. i find you usually pay for extra features like RAID and SLI/corssfire support. that might be great for some, but its not everyone's bag 'o fun.

i tried SLI once with two nvidia 7900 GTO's few years back and i have to say i was not impressed. the system blew me away, sure. problem was as new games came out with more advanced features/effects, the older cards were just not efficient at doing that. i find that for myself i'm better off going with a mid range single card and just upgrading it every two years. cheaper and better experience.
 
I knew it'd perfom great, but i5 level at 4.8GHz which seems to be a pretty obtainable oc with this?! Hot damn!
 
THRESHIN said:
the funny thing is, in my experience you really can do a lot with overclocking by going with a good $100-150 board. i find you usually pay for extra features like RAID and SLI/corssfire support. that might be great for some, but its not everyone's bag 'o fun.

i tried SLI once with two nvidia 7900 GTO's few years back and i have to say i was not impressed. the system blew me away, sure. problem was as new games came out with more advanced features/effects, the older cards were just not efficient at doing that. i find that for myself i'm better off going with a mid range single card and just upgrading it every two years. cheaper and better experience.
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I have found many lower end boards OC pretty well, the only time that has seemed to not be the case was with really power hungry CPU's, but lower draw lower end CPU's, I never got much more out of them by putting them in mid/high range boards. Back with some Core2Duos I could not get anything extra out of them, no matter the mobo, my Q9550 on the other hand saw a good 200MHz gain, but we are talking very large difference in power draw and my guess was the mobo could not regulate it well enough on the cheaper boards, and I don't think that will be the case with this little CPU, I would be willing to bet it OCs pretty well even on low/mid range boards.

I also know many of us already have a pile of extra heatsinks laying around for any OCing needed, so for me, it would be a free upgrade. I was going to pick up the $100 MC deal but sold out before I even found out about it, as I have a few spare HDDs a SSD and 8GB of ram that would have made a perfect HTPC for this combo.
 
Hmm, I wouldn't keep my SB @ 1.5 V 24/7, and it is more tolerant.
 
A dual core without hyperthreading? Yeah its single threaded ability might be great, but try and play Battlefield 4 while watching gay porn and this thing is gonna choke.
 
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