Thanks to Intelfor supplying the Pentium G3258 20th Anniversary for review. A great little chip that has more going for it than you might initially think, and so we're awarding it our OC3D Gamers Choice and, thanks to that £50 price tag, our Value For Money too. So it's cheap as a good night out on the town, responds well to overclocking and yet doesn't cost the earth to replace if things go wrong and, as long as you're judicious in what you're asking it to do, doesn't lag behind its stablemates. But the Pentium has enough to not be discarded out of hand. Even in gaming benchmarks the benefit of a faster, bigger, CPU is clear. Sure there is extra to be had from a better CPU, of course there is. It rewards that performance increase too and, thanks to the results we obtained in both 3D Gaming and general day to day tasks, shows that two cores of suitable speed can be plenty for almost all your needs. We ended up with 4.5GHz 1.2v, which we think you'll agree is a monumental boost. With only a small bump in vCore you can squeeze some extraordinary clock speeds from it. The Haswell CPUs are as easy to overclock as almost any that have ever existed, and the Pentium simply begs to be thrashed like a masochist at an all-you-can-whip party. If you've ever felt like having a go at the world of overclocking then there has rarely been a better time. Thankfully the Pentium G3258 20th Anniversary Edition has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. Of course if you're only getting 3GHz and two cores it's about right. £50 is stupidly cheap for what you're getting. So why? Well, it's tough not to love the price. Except we can see the outfit and we love it. It's so lacking in threads that it has the potential to be the Emperors New Clothes edition. The Pentium hasn't got any extra threads though. When you have 16 or so threads you don't need to be blisteringly fast. It's why a Xeon can get away with such relatively low clockspeeds. In terms of raw calculation the old maxim that more cores is good, even more cores are better, holds true.
Then we discovered it would be a K edition, a full on overclocking model, and be priced so cheaply that it was almost disposable, then our interest was definitely piqued.Ĭlearly if you're only interested in the highest possible numbers, or want to transcode Blu-Ray's, or even just render a short film, then the Pentium G3258 isn't for you. After all, dual cores are for "internet ready PC's" and not much use for anything else. When Intel announced that for the 20th Anniversary of the Pentium processor they were releasing a special edition with two cores and no hyperthreading we were somewhat nonplussed.