Last month, we took our first look at Intel’s dual-core Pentium G3258 processor, comparing it to AMD’s Athlon X4 750K. Both CPUs are potentially sub-$100 stunners capable of driving budget-oriented gaming boxes to new heights through tunable multiplier ratios. The Pentium shot up from a stock 3.2 GHz to 4.5 GHz on both of its cores. The Athlon’s 3.4 GHz base clock rate stabilized at 4.3 GHz. Both processors demonstrated impressive gains in our benchmark suite. But it was the overclocked Pentium’s higher performance and lower power consumption across our many tests that compelled us to give it a Smart Buy award.
At the same time, many of you pointed out that we were testing with an expensive motherboard, pricey cooling, and a graphics card that no budget-oriented buyer would bother with.
Some of that was by design. For instance, our GeForce GTX Titan was chosen for its ability to stomp out graphics-imposed bottlenecks. Do you want to know how an overclock affects gaming performance? Remove GPU horsepower as a limiting factor first. Of course you’re not going to save money on a dual-core CPU and then go all extravagant on a Titan. But at least we get some useful information from such a combination of parts.
The motherboard and heat sink, however, weren’t as necessary for our purposes. Although they helped isolate “weak stock cooling” as an overclocking bottleneck, you’re almost certainly going to shop for a cheap motherboard and cooler in your quest to save a bit of scratch.
Around the same time, news broke that certain motherboard vendors were introducing firmware updates for boards without the Z87 or Z97 platform controller hubs that enabled overclocking. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Intel only sanctions multiplier-based overclocking on its enthusiast-oriented chipsets, and lower-end core logic armed with enthusiast functionality undermined one key differentiator.
Frankly, though, the move made sense. It was a bummer that you needed a $100 motherboard to overclock a $75 processor. And so we’re still seeing those BIOS files propagating, making less expensive platforms overclock-friendly.
The Cheap Performance Challenge
I approached a motherboard vendor with an unconventional question: could the company provide me with one board for the Athlon and another for the Pentium that’d offer performance-optimized potential at the lowest price possible? I’d use the boxed heat sink and fan included with both products. The objective would be to push our processors as far as they’d go for as little money as possible. Outperform and underspend. That’d be the game.

Representatives responded with the A78M-E35 (available for $58 on Newegg) and H81M-P33 (selling for $45 on Newegg). Both represented significant discounts compared to the higher-end motherboards and $70 Noctua cooling solution tested previously. But concerns were expressed about each board’s voltage regulator and unspectacular cooling. Could these things even crest 4 GHz under full load, never mind the overclocks we hit in Intel Pentium G3258 CPU Review: Haswell, Unlocked, For $75?
How’d they stand up to that story’s premium platforms? In a word, amazingly. Understand that the Athlon X4 750K is a 100 W processor, while the Pentium G3258 is a 53 W part. They’ve demonstrated plenty of flexibility, and neither necessarily needs a motherboard with beefy voltage regulation.
It shouldn’t have surprised me, then, that the Athlon hit 4.3 GHz at 1.425 V and ran stably there, just as it did in our previous piece. Where the two configurations differed was thermal margin. Noctua’s NH-U12S gave us more than 25 °C of headroom. AMD’s boxed heat sink and fan (complete with pre-applied thermal interface material) flirted with the 10-degree mark. It’s not the quietest little thing, but it spun up in response to higher demand and kept our test system stable.
The Pentium, also topped with a bundled cooler and factory grease, ran exceedingly warm, too. At the same 4.5 GHz and 1.3 V, it quickly exceeded 90 °C before we intervened, shut down, and reconsidered our approach. Dropping to 4.4 GHz and scaling back to 1.275 V helped a bit. A load temperature around 86 degrees is still warmer than I’d want to see long-term. But with that said, few of us will see loads as demanding as Prime95 for extended periods. After experimenting with 3ds Max—one of the hottest-running real-world apps in the suite—and observing peak temperatures under 80 degrees, I decided to press on with the slightly-lower frequency.
Wait, Did You Say H81?
That’s right. The real star of this show isn’t Intel’s Pentium, but rather the PCB it’s sitting on. Back when you had to choose between Z87 and Z97 for overclocking the G3258, spending more on a motherboard than the processor seemed silly. AMD’s tuned Athlon X4 750K might have trailed in our benchmarks, but at least you could still save a few bucks by buying the low-cost platform.
Then word started spreading that old CPU microcode allowed non-Z core logic to manipulate clock multipliers. Officially, this was a no-no for motherboard vendors to expose publically. But in the words of Ian Malcom, “Life, uh, finds a way.” And so now there are many, many other boards capable of pushing the little dual-core CPU beyond 4 GHz.
The board vendor's team actually offered two suggestions: a B85-based ATX motherboard and that H81-based board we ended up picking. The former simply came too close to higher-end alternatives. Meanwhile a $45 price tag on the diminutive H81-based board undercut even AMD’s mid-range platform. After a quick flash to a beta firmware we found, the H81 platform picked up Intel’s Pentium G3258, opened up ratios as high as 80x, and sent us on our way.
The big question is whether $115 worth of unlocked Pentium and entry-level motherboard can come together and impress us.
Test System Specs
Processors
| Pentium Overclock | Pentium Stock | Athlon X4 Overclock | Athlon X4 Stock | Core i3 | Core i5 | |
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| Frequency | 3.2 GHz (32 * 100 MHz) | 3.2 GHz (32 * 100 MHz) | 3.4 GHz (34 * 100 MHz) | 3.4 GHz (34 * 100 MHz) | 3.5 GHz (35 * 100 MHz) | 3.5 GHz (35 * 100 MHz) |
| Cores | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 4 |
| Socket | LGA 1150 | LGA 1150 | FM2 | FM2 | LGA 1150 | LGA 1150 |
| Cache | 3 MB Shared L3 | 3 MB Shared L3 | 4 MB Shared L2 | 4 MB Shared L2 | 4 MB Shared L3 | 6 MB Shared L3 |
| Other | Power-savings enabled | Power-savings enabled | Turbo Core and Power-savings enabled | Turbo Core and Power-savings enabled | Hyper-Threading and Power-savings enabled | Turbo Boost and Power-savings enabled |
Motherboards
| Pentium Overclock | Pentium Stock | Athlon X4 Overclock | Athlon X4 Stock | Core i3 | Core i5 | |
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| Socket | LGA 1150 | LGA 1150 | FM2 | FM2 | LGA 1150 | LGA 1150 |
| Chipset | Intel Z97 Express | Intel H81 Express | AMD A85X | AMD A78 | Intel Z97 Express | Intel Z97 Express |
| BIOS | 1.3 | Beta | 2.5 | 30.3 | 1.3 | 1.3 |
Coolers
| Pentium Overclock | Pentium Stock | Athlon X4 Overclock | Athlon X4 Stock | Core i3 | Core i5 | |
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| Fan Speed | 100% Duty Cycle | N/A | 100% Duty Cycle | N/A | 100% Duty Cycle | 100% Duty Cycle |
Memory
Graphics
Storage
| Capacity | 256 GB |
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| Interface | SATA 6 Gb/s |
Power Supply
| Maximum Output | 860 Watts |
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| Energy Rating | 80 PLUS Platinum |
| Cabling | Fully Modular |
Operating System & Software
| DirectX | 11 |
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| Graphics Driver | 337.88 |
Benchmark Suite
Adobe Creative Cloud
Audio & Video Encoding
Productivity
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Free
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| Version | 11.0.102.583 | 11.0.0 | 14.0 x64 | 2.68a | 10.0 |
| Description | Read PDF save to Doc, Source: Political Economy (J. Broadhurst 1842) 111 Pages | Print PDF from 115 Page PowerPoint, 128-bit RC4 Encryption | Space Flyby Mentalray, 248 Frames, 1440x1080 | Cycles Engine, Syntax blender -b thg.blend -f 1, 1920x1080, 8x Anti-Aliasing, Render THG.blend frame 1 | Compile Google Chrome, Scripted |
File Compression
Synthetics
Arma 3
The average frame rates in Arma 3 look fairly similar to what we saw in our first look at the Pentium G3258 pitted against AMD’s Athlon X4 750K. The Athlon picks up a little speed, as does Intel’s CPU. Bottom line: at 4.4 GHz, the Pentium does less to bottleneck a GeForce GTX Titan than the Athlon at 4.3 GHz. As you scale back graphics horsepower, the difference between both CPUs will invariably shrink. But if you’re talking potential, well, there it is.
Each configuration appears to encounter occasional frame time variance spikes, though only the stock Athlon’s appear frequently.
Battlefield 4
Battlefield 4 at its Ultra detail setting is taxing enough that these CPUs all appear to be fairly similar. This test does come from the single-player campaign though, which is decidedly graphics-bound.
We’ve certainly heard your calls for more testing from the multi-player component of Battlefield 4 and have even talked to DICE directly about developing something more representative of that aspect. However, they concede the difficulty of generating accurate benchmark numbers, given the ever-changing multi-player world.
At the very least, it’s good to see plenty-playable frame rates, even with a dual-core processor. Frame time variance is incredibly low on average, though we rarely encounter a Haswell-based chip landing in last place. Despite its less efficient architecture, AMD’s four integer units appear better able to facilitate a smooth performance than Intel’s two execution cores.
Grid 2
Grid 2 is notorious for its dependency on CPU and memory performance. But as we’ve seen in the past, four integer units aren’t enough to stave off two Haswell cores. A small win at stock clock rates grows in the face of overclocking, showing Intel’s Pentium G3258 to be faster than an Athlon X4 750K.
Even though the Athlon has little trouble matching (and even beating) the Pentium’s peak performance, Intel more consistently maintains higher average frame rates. Where it falls behind again is in our frame time variance measurement; the G3258 encounters higher spikes more often, though they’re not any more problematic in Grid than they were in Battlefield.
Metro: Last Light
The Athlon and Pentium both enjoy significant speed-ups due to overclocking, nearly matching Intel’s Core i3-4330. Unfortunately, they still register minimum frame rates under 30 FPS when the going gets tough.
Thief
Even with the detail settings cranked up as high as they’ll go, the CPU you choose does make a difference in Thief at 1920x1080. Both Intel’s Pentium and AMD’s Athlon pick up quantifiable performance after modest air-cooled overclocks. As we’ve seen several times already, though, the dual-core Haswell-based chip shines a bit more brightly.
That advantage is diminished by frame time variance numbers indicating hitches and stutters in several places. This stuff isn’t new, either. In several games, Intel’s Haswell architecture delivers spectacular frame rates by virtue of its efficiency, but also stumbles over certain passages more than the quad-core contenders (notice the Core i5 and Athlon X4 at the top of our chart). Does the same phenomenon apply in Tomb Raider?
Tomb Raider
As with Battlefield 4, Tomb Raider is another title limited by the speed of your graphics card (even when you’re using a $1000 board). Our frame rate over time chart shows just how tightly each platform remains grouped—only the overclocked Athlon and Pentium CPUs (plus the stock Pentium) break away from the field.
When so much of the performance story is told by your GPU, don’t expect a host processor swap to affect frame time variance much, either. The dual-core Pentium doesn’t run into the same issues this time around.
World of WarCraft
But World of Warcraft is an entirely different story; it’s heavily affected by CPU performance. Architectural efficiency and thread count both come into play. As a result, the Hyper-Threaded Core i3 and quad-core Core i5 take top honors, followed by Intel’s stock and overclocked Pentium G3258. AMD’s processors simply don’t do as well, consistent with other WoW-based benchmarks we’ve run over the years.
We might have suspected the dual-core Pentium to get punished in our frame time variance benchmarks. It doesn’t, though. Instead, the Athlon struggles most.

The finishing order in 3DMark doesn’t change much from our original look at the Pentium against AMD’s Athlon X4 750K. However, both overclocked CPUs do score lower. That’s understandable in the Pentium’s case, since it’s actually running at a lower clock rate. But the tuned Athlon loses about 500 points.

Similarly, the Athlon and Pentium lose a few points in PCMark’s Creative suite. Those small drops aren’t enough to affect the finishing order compared to our earlier evaluation of the Pentium, and they’re not factored into our upcoming value analysis, either. In the end, stepping down to a less expensive motherboard and factory cooling doesn’t change much when it comes to performance analysis.

The Fritz chess benchmark puts a pointed emphasis on threading, specifically reflecting the integer performance of these CPUs. As a result, Intel’s Haswell-based Core i5-4690K dominates. It’s followed by AMD’s overclocked Athlon X4 750K, which puts a quartet of integer units to good use. The Core i3 places third. Although it only wields two cores, Hyper-Threading helps keep them fully utilized—so much so, in fact, that a dual-core Pentium G3258 overclocked to 4.4 GHz can’t quite keep up.
Content Creation
I should probably preface the next several paragraphs with a caveat: nobody who runs taxing workloads is going to settle for a dual-core Pentium (or even a Core i3/Athlon). If you read my Core i7-4790K review, you know that even a still-mainstream Core i7 can finish our workloads in half the time of what’s reflected here.
Nevertheless, it’s remarkable that Intel’s Pentium G3258 jumps from last place to second with a 1.2 GHz tailwind in 3ds Max. Similarly, AMD’s Athlon X4 750K hops ahead of the pricier (and multiplier-locked) Core i3-4330 after a 900 MHz overclock.
The finishing order doesn’t really change in Blender, nor is Vegas Pro 12’s outcome affected.
Adobe CC
AMD’s Athlon X4 750K overclocked to 4.3 GHz loses a little steam on our new platform in Premiere Pro CC. Still, a higher frequency shaves off more than a minute from its render time.
After Effects is the first title seriously affected by this experiment. Intel’s Pentium runs quite a bit slower, barely beating the stock G3258, while the Athlon seriously regresses. But the explanation is simple enough. Both low-cost motherboards come equipped with two memory slots, cutting us back from 16 to 8 GB of DDR3 RAM. Our After Effects workload is acutely sensitive to available memory per core or thread, which is why performance tanks.
It pops back up in Photoshop, though. The Pentium doesn’t change much. AMD’s Athlon slows down a little, allowing the Core i3 to pass. More interesting is how the Piledriver architecture seems to hold our GeForce GTX Titan back in the OpenCL-accelerated test. Overclocking doesn’t really help alleviate that bottleneck either.
Productivity and Media Encoding
While the Pentium G3258 doesn’t slow down much in FineReader, despite losing 100 MHz of overclocked frequency at the hands of a too-small stock cooler, AMD’s Athlon X4 750K runs about 10 seconds longer in this benchmark. That puts the quad-core processor behind Intel’s dual-core chip.
Visual Studio shows the Athlon performing much more consistently—it nearly ties its previous result. Intel’s Pentium lands just ahead of it, and neither CPU is able to catch a dual-core, Hyper-Threaded Core i3-4330.
The finishing order stays pretty consistent in TotalCode Studio, while the overclocked Athlon moves down a spot in HandBrake. Practically, though, we’d call that a tie with Intel’s more expensive Core i3-4330.
LAME and iTunes are both single-threaded metrics, exercising one core on each CPU. With clock rate and instruction per cycle throughout in the spotlight, an overclocked Haswell-based processor naturally wins. The Piledriver design just can’t keep up, even running at 4.3 GHz.
Compression
Our WinZip benchmark includes three workloads. Sorted by threaded CPU scores, AMD’s Athlon X4 overclocked beyond 4 GHz scores a victory against Intel’s Pentium G3258. In the maximum-compression EZ and OpenCL-accelerated tests, the tables turn.
The finishing order doesn’t change in WinRAR or 7-Zip. The former favors Intel’s Haswell architecture and doesn’t really reward highly parallel configurations, while the latter knows how to exploit AMD’s module-oriented design for maximum performance from four integer units.
If you made it through page 16 of Intel Pentium G3258 CPU Review: Haswell, Unlocked, For $75, then you already know how Intel’s Pentium G3258 and AMD’s Athlon X4 750K size up against each other in a log of power consumption through our entire benchmark suite. At the very end of it all, we determined that an overclocked Pentium’s efficiency is fairly remarkable, while an overclocked Athlon X4 750K does well enough to beat a stock Pentium.
The focus this time around is comparing both of those chips using stripped-down platforms more akin to what an enthusiast on a budget might look for, so considering value becomes important.
Let’s start with a measure of speed. We average together each CPU’s performance in our gaming, media encoding, content creation, productivity, and file compression sub-suites, making those averages our baselines. The processors are individually compared to the baseline, and then averaged across the suites, yielding a relative performance percentage.

Naturally, in a collection of tests biased toward multi-core optimizations, a CPU like Intel’s Core i5-4690K is going to finish in the lead. And by no small margin, either. The Core i3-4330 staves off the Pentium, demonstrating a clear benefit of Hyper-Threading technology as it maximizes core utilization. From there, only an overclocked Pentium G3258 can keep its nose above the performance baseline so clearly skewed by a fast Core i5. The overclocked AMD Athlon X4 750K lands under at 92%, though that’s enough to beat a stock Pentium G3258.
Now, we look at the price of our platforms, including motherboard, processor, and cooler. Everything else is constant from one test setup to the next. Obviously, as you add more hardware to the total system price, differences between them are diluted, so we're only adding up variables.

It surprised us to see Intel price the unlocked Pentium at just $70, $10 under AMD’s competing Athlon X4 750K. But, at least initially, expensive Z97 and Z87 motherboards wrecked any advantage Intel might have enjoyed.
With the advent of overclocking-capable H81, B85, and H87 boards, though, platform cost dropped. Using the products recommended by MSI for entry-level builders, our combination of Intel parts is actually cheaper than the AMD package. That’s why you see the Pentium appear at the top of this chart, followed by AMD’s Athlon X4 750K.
Intel asks quite a bit more for the Core i3 and Core i5, so even if we assume the same motherboard price and give credit for a free heat sink, those two chips land at the bottom of our pricing average.

Dividing performance by price yields a value number for each platform. Higher performance and a lower price hand Intel’s overclocked Pentium G3258 a commanding lead, which is followed by the same Pentium at its stock clock rate. AMD’s overclocked Athlon X4 750K lands in third place, while the stock Athlon barely beats out Intel’s Core i3-4330.
Despite its overwhelming performance advantage, a big price tag penalizes the Core i5-4690K. Many enthusiasts won’t care, preferring to spend more money on a faster CPU for its greater utility in many applications. We totally get that, and would do the same if budget allowed.
Let’s Try That Again
We were happy to take MSI’s guidance on motherboards with overclocking chops at reasonable prices. But for the sake of argument, let’s say you were able to find a Socket FM2+ motherboard for the same price as the H81M-P33 we used, and that it overclocked just as well as our A78M-E35. How would the calculations change?

The outcome wouldn’t change in our performance chart, of course.

Pricing would, though. Because AMD still charges more for its Athlon X4 750K, Intel’s Pentium gets to keep its lead. Meanwhile, the Core i3 and i5 look even worse in the face of cheaper competition. That is to say, the average moves toward lower pricing.

Matching motherboard prices cuts into the Pentium’s advantage a little bit. However, the stock G3258 holds onto its second-place finish behind the Pentium at 4.4 GHz. AMD’s overclocked Athlon nearly ties for second, though, and the stock AMD processor extends its value lead over the Core i3.
Our first look at Intel’s Pentium G3258 leveraged relatively high-end hardware to extract the CPU’s maximum potential. We pulled a lot of performance data from the chip, we drew a number of conclusions about efficiency based on those observations and power consumption measurements. As a result, the Pentium G3258 received an honor not bestowed upon many processors: it won Tom’s Hardware Smart Buy recognition.
Many of you agreed with our assessment. Others scoffed at the idea of a dual-core CPU in an enthusiast space dominated by four-, six-, and eight-core alternatives. And a curious few asked for a follow-up that swapped our expensive motherboards and aftermarket heat sinks for components you’d be more likely to use with Athlon and Pentium processors.
MSI was more than happy to poll its engineers for their advice on the least-expensive motherboards from both camps still able to tune our two CPUs. We took those products, added factory cooling, and made another run at overclocking. The pair of processors ran significantly hotter—Intel’s Pentium so much so that we needed to pull its clock rate and voltage down a little bit. They performed stably, though, maintaining frequencies in excess of 4 GHz even on diminutive coolers.
Not For Everyone, Obviously
In a pure comparison of performance, price, and value, the Pentium G3258 remains a dominant force.
If you’re forced to buy a high-end Z87 or Z97 motherboard, that becomes a harder case to argue. However, in light of lower-end boards with overclocking-enabled firmware versions (which aren’t supposed to exist, but clearly do), it becomes possible to build a Pentium-based box inexpensively.
Does that mean you should? Depends on what you use your computer for, really. A dual-core CPU does suffer inherent disadvantages in software specifically programmed to take advantage of as many cores as possible. Our suite is loaded with those types of tests, and we saw a few instances where the dual-module Athlon and its four integer units beat out Intel’s Pentium.
In the same vein, while the G3258 consistently registered higher average frame rates than the Athlon in our game tests, it was also struck by frame time variance spikes in a number of titles. Intel’s Core i3 and i5 didn’t demonstrate similar behavior. So, it appears those two cores can’t always keep up.
Then again, you’re spending $115 on a Pentium G3258 and MSI’s H81M-P33. You’ll have a difficult time beating that combination's value, given what it can do. A significantly better experience is going to require a Core i5, and you’ll part ways with more than twice as much money for the motherboard/processor pair.
Go low-budget on your motherboard and lean on a bundled cooler, or spend a little extra for a third-party heat sink—either way you go, Intel’s Pentium G3258 remains a recommended buy thanks to the Haswell architecture. It’s great in a mainstream desktop, and the platform handles productivity apps and games more deftly than you’d expect from a $70 chip in a $45 motherboard.
