Pentium G3258 (Anniversary) review.

[AlienALX]

Yay, so I'm breaking my duck for this year and this is the first review (with data) that I've done in an absolute age.

Today's review concentrates on the Intel Pentium G3258, also known as the 20th Anniversary CPU. I have built a completely mismatched PC using parts I had lying around for months. The spec of the test system are as follows (the parts that matter).

Intel Pentium G3258 overclocked to 4.2ghz turbo @ 1.197v (max the board allows)
4gb Geil Extreme ram running @ 1333mhz
Gigabyte B85N "Phoenix" ITX motherboard (max 1.2v)
MSI Nvidia GTX Titan Black stock clocks

So what is the aim of this review?

Well, I will be honest I love testing things. Reviews of the Pentium were pretty plentiful at launch but sadly it was benched and tested as a entry level CPU and thus was not tested with high end graphical hardware. This is a shame, because there may be a point where the CPU can be bottlenecked by the graphics hardware. For example, running something like a Radeon 270 with this CPU could cause a situation where you are GPU limited and thus the CPU is made to look bad.

So the aim here was to eliminate any graphical bottle necking at 1080p resolution and find out exactly what the processor itself is capable of.

The CPU

Intel decided a while back to finally release a budget CPU that could be overclocked. They did this to coincide with the 20th anniversary of their first Pentium CPU. Here it is here, retail package.



And Intel's data sheet.



This CPU can easily be overclocked. What makes this CPU an even more tempting proposition is that certain board partners have released cheap low end motherboards with the overclocking options left active. This means it's not very difficult to grab a board that will overclock and the CPU for a very low price.

The games and testing methodology

Please note I have chosen games from multiple genres in order to help those out who may be considering buying one of these CPUs. As thus I have chosen a certain type of game and consider those the bigger, leading type of their class (so for example racing games, first person shooters and so on).

Each game has been set to run at the absolute maximum settings the games will allow. I decided to use 2XMSAA when possible due to the amount of system ram, as upping the MSAA can cause the GPU to lean on the system memory.

The benchmarks

OK let's get to the good part.

First up Dirt 3 - Note - Max FPS is not recorded.



At first I had to rub my eyes and look again. Got to admit, was very shocked by the result. Obviously Dirt 3 is not CPU bound and doesn't really care how many cores you have. Moving on..

Grid 2



And again I was pretty surprised at how well the Pentium performed. Time for some first person fun.

Sleeping Dogs.



Not my sort of game and to be honest I only played it for about an hour before I stopped playing. But again we see that the Pentium is not really stopping the system from achieving perfectly playable FPS.

Hitman Absolution



Again not one of my favourite games but it is quite hard to get running at maximum settings but once again was absolutely no problem at all for the Pentium.

Metro 2033



Note - this benchmark will always come back with a very low FPS score no matter how good your rig is. What's important here is the average FPS and 64 is again more than playable. In fact it's actually better than just more than playable it's quite amazing. It may be an older title but that doesn't matter, it's still a pig to run.

Crysis 3



And I will admit the first jaw dropping moment of the day. I just couldn't believe that the Pentium was able to keep the minimum FPS playable. This is a test that I tried, and failed, using both an I5 2400 at stock speed and a AMD FX 8320 at stock speed. The AMD needed serious overclocking to get into the 40s. However once again the average FPS is truly remarkable and again, more than playable. Stunning !

GTAV



Please note ! I had to enable VSYNC because the game was stuttering quite badly with it disabled. One would think that with it enabled a average FPS count would be hard to maintain, but once again the Pentium truly left me flabbergasted. I really could not believe how well the game ran on such an entry level CPU.

World of tanks



STALKER - Call of Pripyat



Conclusion

A couple, nay, few years ago I decided to have some fun with a Celeron G530 and a GTX 480. At that time the GTX 480 was still a high end card and I wanted to see what it could do with the cheapest processor available from Intel. Those results left me quite shocked, with the rig only really failing in Mafia 2 which seems to be heavily CPU bound.

I repeated that test this time around and to be honest the game was pretty much unplayable with the Pentium, even with it overclocked. I would imagine it had something to do with Physx which I did set to maximum. However, every other result from the Pentium has absolutely amazed me.

I did read in reviews that in certain games the Pentium could be an issue. However, using many of the latest games I saw no issues at all. It wouldn't surprise me if the minimum FPS counts could actually be improved by running 8gb of ram, but I really wanted to keep the rest of the rig as cheap and low rent as possible.

 

[Wraith]

S.T.A.L.K.E.R is the game to punish the G3258, Max everything and ram it up to 1080 and you'll see it use 98% - 100% of both cores 100% of the time and yet it still soldiers on giving very steady frames and a smooth experience. I loved the G3258 and hold it in high regard as a recommended budget gaming CPU.

on a side note my i5 4440 struggles to match the performance of the G3258 in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

 

[barnsley]

Its a great cpu for older games.

GTA online (texture loading), Arma and Battlefield online are too much for it.

 

[tinytomlogan]

Both of the above are right - there are very few games that need more but the few that do you really do notice it.

For a budget rig shes a little cracker or more importantly for someone to play about with overclocking.

 

[Wraith]

Both of the above are right - there are very few games that need more but the few that do you really do notice it.

For a budget rig shes a little cracker or more importantly for someone to play about with overclocking.

Oh I forgot about OC'ing they love the volts and herz

 

[AlienALX]

Both of the above are right - there are very few games that need more but the few that do you really do notice it.

For a budget rig shes a little cracker or more importantly for someone to play about with overclocking.

I'm desperately trying to trip it up but I must admit it's making it difficult lol.

I really thought GTAV was going to bring it to its knees but nope, keeps on fighting.

Very happy with it. I was thinking about a Xeon but now I cba. It'll do until DX12 comes along

Wraith - what exact S.T.A.L.K.E.R are you referring to mate? SOC, Clear Sky or Pripyat? I've got the original and I think I may have a naughty backup of Pripyat. Would need to rummage through the archives but have no problems running tests as that's what I get out of doing stuff like this.

 

[Wraith]

Clear Sky was the most intensive on hardware overall, but Pripyat running @1080 in DX10 is a CPU crippler.

 

[AlienALX]

OK I'll see if I can find it mush.

 

[AlienALX]

OK so I managed to find STALKER COP.

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
5299, 90000, 37, 63, 58.878

90 second run, everything on max, draw distance full, object detail full, HBAO and 2xmsaa as per the norm. EDIT. For some reason VSYNC can not be disabled.

And a frame by frame recording.

FPS
61
60
59
60
60
59
60
61
60
60
60
60
60
60
60
60
60
60
60
60
59
60
60
49
53
60
60
60
60
60
60
60
59
60
60
61
59
60
60
59
60
60
61
60
60
60
60
39
61
59
60
59
52
60
60
59
60
60
60
60
58
60
60
60
59
38
60
59
60
60
60
61
60
60
60
60
41
59
61
60
54
62
59
61
60
59
60
60
60
59

TBH I just think it's the brute power of the Titan Black.

 

[AlienALX]

Added STALKER scores and World of Tanks.