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Intel Pentium G3258 CPU Review: Haswell, Unlocked, For $75
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1. An Enthusiast-Oriented Pentium CPU?

Up until now, every debate we’ve moderated between enthusiasts looking for CPUs on a budget involved an overclockable AMD processor and one of Intel’s multiplier-locked (but more efficient) models. Typically, they’re Core i3s, though if it's important to duck in under $100, you're looking at a Pentium, tops.

Intel’s stiff upper lip benefits AMD greatly. Despite higher power consumption and lower performance in a number of workloads, continued support of the enthusiast community earns AMD plenty of cachet. Meanwhile, if you want to overclock an Intel processor, your cheapest option is the $230 Core i5-3570K.

For years now, I’ve told the powers that be inside Intel they need an unlocked CPU for the folks who grew up tuning Pentiums and Celeron 300As. Surely, such an offering would make our value comparisons much more interesting.

I was more than just a little excited, then, when I learned that Intel did, in fact, plan to introduce a low-cost, multiplier-unlocked processor for enthusiasts to tool around with. And I have to imagine AMD was mortified.

The Pentium G3258: An Enthusiast Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing

Claiming to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its Pentium brand (which was technically last year), Intel is rolling out a Pentium G3258 based on its Haswell architecture. Operating at a fixed 3.2 GHz, the G3258 falls right into the middle of Intel’s current desktop Pentium family that ranges from 3.0 to 3.4 GHz. None of the Pentiums support Turbo Boost technology, none of them offer Hyper-Threading support, and all of them, including the G3258, sport two physical execution cores.

Of course, each core is complemented by 256 KB of L2 cache. There’s also a 3 MB shared L3 cache between them. Intel integrates its HD Graphics block with 10 execution units, specifying the engine to run between 350 and 1100 MHz—same as the other Pentium models. And like the rest of the family, officially, Pentium G3258 has a 53 W TDP.

If you didn’t know any better, the 20th anniversary Pentium blends right in with its stable mates. But it boasts that unlocked multiplier, which means unencumbered overclocking using the only practical knob available for tuning Intel processors. We just saw the Core i7-4790K hit 4.7 GHz in single-threaded workloads (Core i7-4790K Review: Devil's Canyon Tantalizes Enthusiasts). In theory, that should create quite a bit of headroom for a 3.2 GHz CPU to scale up. Then again, it’s just as possible these dual-core dies aren’t flexible. There is no precedent for this; we’re literally looking at Intel’s first unlocked Haswell-based chip with two cores.

Quick Sync technology is also enabled, accelerating H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 decoding, along with H.264 encode in properly-optimized applications. This might seem like a relatively minor addition to the Pentium family. But take a look at this page of my Core i7-4770K review. If you watch a lot of multimedia content, capture video, or transcode from one format into another for your mobile devices, Intel’s application of fixed-function resources is quickly going to become a good friend.

2. Overclocking Pentium G3258 And Athlon X4 750K

In the past, I could have given you a play-by-play of how a low-cost processor comparison would go, without even touching hardware. The stock AMD CPU would have likely been beaten by Intel’s more efficient architecture, but then we would have overclocked to see AMD step into a more commanding position. Now, with both processors tunable, it’s anyone’s game.

Overclocking Athlon X4 750K

Let’s start with a known quantity. The Athlon X4 750K starts life as a Trinity APU, manufactured on a 32 nm process. Its CPU complex is Piledriver-based. To that end, it features a pair of modules, each with two integer units and a shared floating-point unit. AMD calls this four cores. The company then disables the graphics component of the APU, yielding a pure host processor with no Radeon engine to consume thermal headroom. And yet, the Athlon retains a 100 W TDP rating.

By default, the 750K sports a 3.4 GHz base clock and a 4 GHz maximum Turbo Core frequency. There’s a 3.7 GHz boost state in between, too.

Using MSI’s FM2-A85XA-G65 motherboard, we were able to increase voltage to 1.5 V and get all four cores running at 4.5 GHz through much of our benchmark suite (with a 2.2 GHz northbridge). Unfortunately, random crashes nudged us down to 4.4 and then to 4.3 GHz for total stability in Prime95. Temperature wasn’t the problem. AMD’s OverDrive software reported more than 25 degrees of margin throughout. And we simply didn’t want to push any higher on the voltage.

After slowing to 4.3 GHz, we were able to pull back to 1.425 V for a more comfortable long-term setup.

Overclocking Pentium G3258

With no precedent established, we borrow principles from our Haswell-based K-series CPUs for tuning the Pentium G3258 on MSI’s Z97 Gaming 7 motherboard. An unlocked multiplier makes it easy to test the chip’s upper bound. Given a fairly aggressive voltage on the Athlon X4, we went ahead and used 1.3 V to get Intel’s contender running at 4.7 GHz with both cores taxed and 4.8 GHz in single-threaded workloads. Despite temperatures in the mid-60 °C range, though, that proved unstable through our entire suite.

Eventually, we settled on 4.5 GHz with two active cores and a maximum Turbo Boost setting of 4.6 GHz for unflagging stability under Prime95. That sounds fairly modest for something like a Core i7-4770K. But remember this is a 3.2 GHz CPU overclocked more than 40%.

3. How We Tested Intel’s Pentium G3258 And AMD’s Athlon X4 750K
Test Hardware
ProcessorsIntel Core i5-4690K (Haswell) 3.5 GHz (35 * 100 MHz), Quad-Core, LGA 1150, 6 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost enabled, Power-savings enabled

Intel Core i3-4330 (Haswell) 3.5 GHz (35 * 100 MHz), Dual-Core, LGA 1150, 4 MB Shared L3, Hyper-Threading enabled, Power-savings enabled

Intel Pentium G3258 (Haswell) 3.2 GHz (32 * 100 MHz), Dual-Core, LGA 1150, 3 MB Shared L3, Power-savings enabled

AMD Athlon X4 750K (Trinity) 3.4 GHz (34 * 100 MHz), Quad-Core, Socket FM2, 4 MB Shared L2, Turbo Core enabled, Power-savings enabled
MotherboardMSI Z97 Gaming 7 (LGA 1150) Intel Z97 Express, BIOS 1.3

MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 (Socket FM2) AMD A85X, BIOS 2.5
Memory
G.Skill 16 GB (4 x 4 GB) DDR3-1600, F3-12800CL9Q2-32GBZL @ DDR3-1600 at 1.5 V
Hard Drive
Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB, SATA 6 Gb/s
Graphics
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan 6 GB
Power Supply
Corsair AX860i, 80 PLUS Platinum, 860 W
Heat Sink
Noctua NH-U12S, Fan set to 100% duty cycle
System Software And Drivers
Operating System
Windows 8 Professional x64
DirectX
DirectX 11
Graphics DriverNvidia GeForce Release 337.88

The Pentium G3258 isn't yet available; it's expected in stock towards the end of June. However, pre-order pricing puts it $5 lower than AMD's Athlon X4 750K. That's impressive of course, but it doesn't take into account the fact that overclocking Intel's K-series (and now 20th anniversary Pentium) processors require a higher-end platform.

Intel says its Pentium G3258 is compatible with 8- and 9-series chipsets, and we used MSI's Z97 Gaming 7 for our tests. Of course, you don't need a $190 board. Z97-based offerings start at around $100.

But AMD's Athlon X4 750K is more flexible in that regard. The MSI FM2-A85X-G65 we're using is no longer available. A rough equivalent, MSI's A88X-G45, goes for $120, though. And you can find plenty-capable A88X-based motherboards for under $75. Take that $25-or-greater (if you use a lower-end AMD chipset) difference into consideration when you talk about platform pricing.

Benchmark Configuration
Adobe Creative Suite
Adobe After Effects CCVersion 12.0.0.404 x64: Create Video which includes three Streams, 210 Frames, Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously
Adobe Photoshop CCVersion 14.0 x64: Filter 15.7 MB TIF Image: Radial Blur, Shape Blur, Median, Polar Coordinates
Adobe Premeire Pro CCVersion 7.0.0, 6.61 GB MXF Project to H.264 to H.264 Blu-ray, Output 1920x1080, Maximum Quality
Audio/Video Encoding
iTunesVersion 11.0.4.4 x64: Audio CD (Terminator II SE), 53 minutes, default AAC format 
LAME MP3Version 3.98.3: Audio CD "Terminator II SE", 53 min, convert WAV to MP3 audio format, Command: -b 160 --nores (160 Kb/s)
HandBrake CLIVersion: 0.9.9: Video from Canon EOS 7D (1920x1080, 25 FPS) 1 Minutes 22 Seconds
Audio: PCM-S16, 48,000 Hz, Two-Channel, to Video: AVC1 Audio: AAC (High Profile)
TotalCode Studio 2.5Version: 2.5.0.10677: MPEG-2 to H.264, MainConcept H.264/AVC Codec, 28 sec HDTV 1920x1080 (MPEG-2), Audio: MPEG-2 (44.1 kHz, 2 Channel, 16-Bit, 224 Kb/s), Codec: H.264 Pro, Mode: PAL 50i (25 FPS), Profile: H.264 BD HDMV
Productivity
ABBYY FineReaderVersion 11.0.102.583: Read PDF save to Doc, Source: Political Economy (J. Broadhurst 1842) 111 Pages
Adobe Acrobat XIVersion 11.0.0: Print PDF from 115 Page PowerPoint, 128-bit RC4 Encryption
Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 and 2013
Version 14.0 x64: Space Flyby Mentalray, 248 Frames, 1440x1080
BlenderVersion: 2.68a, Cycles Engine, Syntax blender -b thg.blend -f 1, 1920x1080, 8x Anti-Aliasing, Render THG.blend frame 1
Visual Studio 2010Version 10.0, Compile Google Chrome, Scripted
File Compression
WinZipVersion 18.0 Pro: THG-Workload (1.3 GB) to ZIP, command line switches "-a -ez -p -r"
WinRARVersion 5.0: THG-Workload (1.3 GB) to RAR, command line switches "winrar a -r -m3"
7-ZipVersion 9.30 Alpha: THG-Workload (1.3 GB) to .7z, command line switches "a -t7z -r -m0=LZMA2 -mx=5"
Synthetic Benchmarks and Settings
3DMark 11
Version: 1.0.5
PCMark 8
Version: 2.0, Creative (Conventional)
4. Results: Arma 3

Athough first-person shooters are typically graphics-bound, Arma 3 at 1920x1080, even with Ultra settings enabled, appears quite platform-dependent when we use a GeForce GTX Titan.

The Athlon X4 750K, overclocked to 4.3 GHz across its four cores, cannot catch a stock dual-core Pentium G3258. And yet, it’d be inaccurate to say this game isn’t optimized for more cores. After all, the stock Core i5-4690K, with its 3.5 GHz base clock rate, is notably quicker than Intel’s 20th anniversary Pentium running 1 GHz faster. Intel’s advantage appears to come from the efficiency of its architecture compared to Piledriver.

You do get a speed-up from tuning AMD’s Athlon. But the gains from tweaking Intel’s Pentium are much more pronounced. In fact, they’re significant enough to take the $75 Pentium almost up to Core i3-4330 levels—and that’s a $140 chip.

Frame time variance is greatest on the stock budget-oriented processors, while the Core i3 and i5 prove to be very well-behaved. Then again, we wouldn’t worry about any of these results.

5. Results: Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4, even at a fairly mainstream 1920x1080, is quite graphics-dependent with the Ultra detail preset selected. The Core i5 and i3 are followed by Intel’s Pentium G3258 overclocked to 4.5 GHz. However, that CPU only averages a couple of frames per second more than an Athlon X4 750K.

Charted over time, you can see how close the frame rates come to each other. Only Intel’s Core i5-4690K noses above the rest of the field.

Again, frame time variance with a GeForce GTX Titan is extremely low, particularly when you overclock the least-expensive CPUs.

6. Results: Grid 2

Flipping back the other direction, we know Grid 2 to especially tax a system’s memory subsystem. But because all of these configurations employ DDR3 memory at 1600 MT/s and a GeForce GTX Titan, we can be certain that the big performance swings are a result of swapping CPUs in and out.

The Pentium’s average frame rate jumps more than 20% due to overclocking, while the tuned Athlon is a little over 10% quicker. Intel’s Core i3-4330 is barely faster. The Core i5 enjoys a greater margin, though at significant expense.

Looking at the frame rates over time nicely illustrates the impact of cores, clock rate, and architectural differences.

Much credit goes to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan graphics card, but frame time variance is remarkably low across the board. In the sample over time, AMD’s Athlon X4 750K stands out most prominently in orange, and it does encounter a handful of spikes. However, the 95th percentile figure is still a scant 3 ms.

7. Results: Metro: Last Light

This one took me by surprise. Metro typically shows itself to be quite demanding of graphics resources. But at a Very High DirectX 11 detail setting, the game does want to be running on a faster host processor, too.

Again, overclocking the Pentium G3258 yields a tremendous performance boost (26%). AMD’s Athlon X4 750K enjoys a still-impressive 16% gain.

The stock Pentium and Athlon suffer minimums that approach 20 FPS, while the overclocked chips are closer to 30 FPS. Meanwhile, the Core i5-4690K achieves a minimum frame rate of 44, demonstrating the importance of balance. Without question, overclocking the quad-core i5 would unlock even more of the GK110 GPU’s potential in this title.

Compare the black line to the red, and the purple line to the orange. That’s the difference attributable to overclocking.

Frame time variance in Metro registers a little higher than the games we’ve tested thus far, but it’s not severe. The stock Pentium and Athlon fare worst; the performance benefits conferred by overclocking help reduce variance, also.

8. Results: Thief

Processor performance matters at the highest detail settings of Thief, too. In this case, however, even the stock Pentium outperforms AMD’s overclocked Athlon X4 750K. As far as averages go, tweaking the Pentium pushes performance above Intel’s Core i3-4330, though that Hyper-Threading-enabled CPU achieves a slightly higher minimum frame rate.

Tracking performance over time, it’s easy to gauge the impact of overclocking on Intel’s unlocked Pentium and AMD’s Athlon X4.  

Intel’s Pentium G3258 registers the highest frame time variance in Thief, and you can see a handful of big spikes in the variance over time chart below.

This outcome is particularly interesting since the frame rate figures in the two previous charts suggested such good behavior from the Pentium. What we see here instead suggests the dual-core, non-Hyper-Threaded processor suffers incurs more quantifiable stuttering, even paired to a very fast GeForce GTX Titan, compared to the other contenders able to handle four threads.

9. Results: Tomb Raider

Forcing Tomb Raider to run at its Ultimate detail preset is a recipe for graphics-bound performance, particularly on an Nvidia card. As you can see in the frame rate over time chart, all of our CPUs land close to each other in a trace of speed.

You choice in processor doesn’t appear to matter much, even at a relatively mainstream resolution of 1920x1080. With this combination of graphics settings, it’s the GeForce GTX Titan holding us back.

The frame time variance figures are fairly unremarkable. All of the CPUs demonstrate respectable results.

10. Results: World of Warcraft

As in Thief, Intel’s Pentium G3258 beats AMD’s Athlon X4 750K in World of Warcraft at the game’s Ultra detail preset. You can take the Trinity-based processor, overclock it, and it’s still 17% slower than the stock Pentium. Of course, once you tune Intel’s CPU, that number grows to 30%.

A 4.5 GHz clock rate is enough for the G3258 to hang with the 3.5 GHz Core i3-4330. Although that processor nurses a 1 GHz frequency deficit, it benefits from Hyper-Threading technology and an extra megabyte of shared L3 cache.

Three different configurations jam up at the top of our frame rate over time chart, one of which is the overclocked Pentium G3258. You can see just how much performance increases compared to the stock 3.2 GHz, indicated by the red line. And of course, it’s clear that overclocking AMD’s Athlon X4 750K allows the GeForce GTX Titan to breathe a little, as well.

None of these frame time variance figures are bothersome. The big spikes you see in the chart below come from our flight path-based benchmark, which stutters right as the kite from Shado-Pan Fallback takes off.

11. Results: Synthetics

With that small library of games benchmarked, I’m not sure there’s much more we could learn from a synthetic. However, there actually is some useful information to digest.

First, let’s look at the Graphics score. Typically, you’d expect this to be even from top to bottom, as Futuremark effectively shifts as much processing to the GPU as possible. And yet, while the Core i5, i3, and overclocked Pentium demonstrate fairly similar scores, the Athlon is a bit slower, and the stock Pentium G3258 downright hobbles a GeForce GTX Titan. Don’t be bothered by this; nobody’s going to pair a $75 CPU and $1000 graphics card. Still, even in a synthetic, it’s impossible to overcome that gross imbalance.

Shift focus over to the Physics suite, intended to isolate CPU performance. Futuremark reflects the superiority of four physical cores in a threading-optimized game by giving Intel’s Core i5 a big advantage. The Core i3 is a dual-core chip; however, it employs Hyper-Threading to schedule four threads, and so it claims a second-place finish. AMD employs a dual-module design with four integer units and a lot of shared resources. At a stock 3.4 GHz, it finishes second-to-last. But overclocking to 4.3 GHz yields third place. The dual-core, no-frills Pentium gets hammered in stock form, and picks up a spot once it’s overclocked.

The overall score blends the outcomes. Except for the Core i5 and i3, those red bars don’t really do a good job forecasting real-world performance. However, we like to think of synthetics as better gauges of a future where everything is maximally optimized, and that’d take more emphasis on multi-core CPUs in games.

We enter the realm of performance on the desktop outside of gaming with a PCMark chart. The Core i3 is missing because it repeatedly failed this benchmark.

Stock, Intel’s Pentium G3258 roughly ties the overclocked Athlon, while tuning takes the Pentium up several notches. It remains to be seen if these numbers translate over to our benchmark suite.

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 its four 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 4.5 GHz can’t quite keep up.

12. Results: Content Creation

I should probably preface the next several pages of benchmarks with a caveat: nobody who runs taxing workloads is going to look first to a dual-core Pentium (or even a Core i3/Athlon). 3ds Max is a workstation-class app. And 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 1.3 GHz tailwind. Similarly, AMD’s Athlon X4 750K jumps ahead of the pricier (and multiplier-locked) Core i3-4330 after a 900 MHz overclock.

The results are largely the same in Blender, though this time, Hyper-Threading helps Intel’s Core i3 score a second-place berth. Impressively, overclocking really propels the Pentium and Athlon processors into another level of performance.

Sony’s Vegas Pro is a little different in that it leverages OpenCL acceleration to offload some processing to the GeForce GTX Titan. However, CPU performance still matters, and our overclocks help both the Athlon and Pentium improve their standing quite a bit. The Pentium G3258 pulls up just shy of the Core i3-4330 for $65 less.

Granted, if you’re serious about video work, even an unmodified Core i5-4690K should be proof that Intel’s quad-core offerings are in another league entirely.

13. Results: Adobe CC

You wouldn’t expect a straight-up dual-core Pentium to hang with a Hyper-Threaded Core i3 and overclocked dual-module Athlon X4, but there it is.

Again, though, just look at the Core i5 in comparison. And that’s a 3.5 GHz CPU with 800 or 900 MHz of additional headroom available. A quad-core Haswell-based chip (or better) is the way to go when you’re doing heavy lifting.

The same conclusions apply to After Effects. Yes, overclocking does wonders for the Pentium G3258. But Intel’s Core i5 is so much faster. You can shave off 56% of the Pentium’s overclocked result by going with a stock Core i7-4790K if rendering performance really matters to you.

This chart reflects a pair of benchmarks, which need to be looked at separately.

If you run a lot of threaded filters, the red bars matter most. They show Intel’s Pentium G3258 and AMD’s Athlon X4 750K pretty much tied in their stock form. Overclocking helps them both quite a bit, and they both leap past Intel’s $140 Core i3-4330. The extra clock rate favors Intel’s Pentium a little more, though. No matter—if you’re an artist, strongly consider spending more on a quad-core CPU. The Core i5’s finish illustrates why.

Our OpenCL-accelerated numbers are far more problematic for AMD. The Intel CPUs get subtle speed-ups as we shift from stock Pentium to Core i3 to overclocked Pentium, and finally the Core i5. But the overclocked Athlon is 87% slower than the overclock Pentium. Based on what we’ve seen thus far, and knowing this test offloads work to the GeForce card, we have to imagine there’s an issue keeping Nvidia’s GK110 GPU fed on AMD’s platform. The A85X platform only supports PCI Express 2.0, but it’s hard to imagine transfer rates across the PCIe bus making this much difference.

14. Results: Productivity And Media Encoding

Presumably, ABBYY’s FineReader 11 makes extensive use of AMD’s integer units, as the Athlon X4 750K in its stock form bests Intel’s Pentium G3258. And even though we’re not able to get as-aggressive of an overclock out of it, the Athlon scores a second-place finish, just ahead of the Core i3-4330.

As if to illustrate how well-threaded this task is, Intel’s quad-core Core i5 puts the rest of the field to shame, finishing 37% faster than the well-tuned Athlon. And that’s at its stock clock rate. Then again, the -4690K is a $240 processor, 200% pricier than AMD’s X4 750K. This isn’t a bad showing from the budget chips.

The Pentium and Athlon enjoy big gains from overclocking, but can’t catch the Hyper-Threaded Core i3 or quad-core i5 in our Chrome compilation workload.

Intel’s Pentium G3258 takes a last-place finish and turns it into second place with some heavy overclocking. The Athlon fares better than the Pentium at its stock clock rate, and then falls in behind the tuned dual-core chip when we crank clock rates up.

The same situation shakes out in our HandBrake benchmark, only this time, the overclocked Athlon edges out Intel’s $140 Core i3 to finish third.

Parallelization goes out the window in our LAME workload. A 4.6 GHz Haswell core easily rules this test, trumping the Core i5’s 3.9 GHz maximum Turbo Boost setting. Of course, the K-series CPU can also be readily overclocked, so expect a similar ceiling from that processor.

Unfortunately, AMD gives up a ton of single-core performance due to issues with IPC. A 900 MHz overclock helps the Athlon X4 750K. But even at 4.3 GHz, it can’t catch Intel’s Pentium G3258 at 3.2 GHz.

The same thing happens in iTunes. We won’t dwell on it.

15. Results: Compression Apps

Three different WinZip tests give us plenty of data to pore over.

We’re sorting by the outcome of the CPU test, in red. There, the dual-core Pentium and dual-module Athlon, both overclocked, achieve a similar result slightly behind a much more expensive Core i3-4330.

When you push maximum compression using the –ez switch, AMD falters. Intel’s overclocked Pentium basically ties the Core i3, and both best the tweaked Athlon X4 750K by almost 15%.

Our OpenCL-accelerated test doesn’t punish AMD as severely as our Photoshop-based test did. Then again, work is only offloaded to the GeForce card when a file larger than 8 MB needs to be compressed, so the API isn’t in play throughout this benchmark.

Overclocking benefits both AMD and Intel, though the Pentium’s architecture appears better-suited to WinRAR right out of the gate. Even at 4.3 GHz, the Athlon X4 750K can’t match a stock Pentium G3258.

The tables turn in 7-Zip, where the overclocked Pentium cannot touch AMD’s stock Athlon X4 750K. 7-Zip is well-known to lean heavily on available cores/threads, and the more parallelized architectures leave Intel’s dual-core solution in the dust.

16. Power Consumption And Efficiency

The following chart reflects power consumption throughout our benchmark suite, which gets logged every two seconds. The long, straight section at the end represents 30 minutes of idle time inserted by our automated script to better reflect actual use when we calculate averages.

Our comparison is principally between Intel’s Pentium G3258 and AMD’s Athlon X4 750K. We’ve seen how both CPUs size up in the performance metrics, and now we get a better idea of how much power they pull down along the way.

All four configurations spike into similar territory. Three settle around the same idle power, while one (the stock Pentium G3258) idles quite a bit higher. Interestingly, this is the same behavior observed from Intel’s Core i7-4790K on MSI’s Z97 Gaming 7. Since the Core i7-4770K was fine, I’m inclined to believe there’s some firmware work to do for Intel’s newest multiplier-unlocked models.

That long stretch in the middle, which is our Visual Studio test, best represents a CPU-heavy task with no graphics intervention. It shows the stock Pentium using the least power, followed by the overclocked Pentium, the stock Athlon, and the overclocked Athlon, just as each CPU’s TDP would indicate.

Based on the length of the lines, we also see that the stock Pentium G3258 is the slowest entry, followed by the stock Athlon X4 750K. You can’t really see it behind the other lines, but the overclocked Pentium wraps up first.

When you average out power consumption across the entire line graph, you get the above chart. The stock Pentium G3258 should probably be quite a bit lower. However, because there appears to be an issue with it idling at stock clock rates, 30 minutes is spent more than 20 W too high.

At any rate, the overclocked Pentium certainly uses more power in its quest, due to the higher voltage and clock rate. But we also know it finishes the tasks we throw at it faster. Meanwhile, overclocking AMD’s Athlon X4 750K doesn’t have a profound impact on average power use at all. That likely indicates good things for efficiency.

A glance at the line graph gave us this same information, but we more clearly see the finishing order of our entire suite. Intel’s Pentium G3258 starts as the slowest contender and, through overclocking, ends up fastest.

Multiplying power consumption and run duration gives us a Wh rating for each system.

Intel’s Pentium G3258 starts off using little power. However, mediocre performance and a poor idle combine to delivery lackluster efficiency. Only the stock Athlon X4 750K is worse. Its performance is better than the Pentium’s, but a 100 W TDP hurts the equation.

Overclocking to 4.3 GHz helps the Athlon improve its performance even more without affecting power consumption much. But the Pentium can’t be stopped. Average power use jumps 10 W (12%), while the benchmark suite finishes 23% quicker. The result is a first-place finish in efficiency.

17. Haswell, Unlocked, For $75

The Pentium G3258, at 3.2 GHz, is a fairly slow CPU. Two cores, 3 MB of shared L3 cache, no Hyper-Threading—those specifications are indeed Pentium-class. But it’s the unlocked clock multiplier that makes Intel’s 20th anniversary Pentium something special.

And let’s face it: nobody’s going to buy the G3258 and leave it at 3.2 GHz. Enthusiasts are going to take it and crank it up beyond 4 GHz.  

Before now, it was hard to go wrong with AMD’s Athlon X4 750K. Devotees of Don’s Best Gaming CPUs For The Money column know that’s where his recommendations begin. But you can almost scratch everything under the $200 mark by tuning this processor up to 4.5 GHz.

The Pentium isn’t perfect. Threaded workloads are going to punish its two cores. I find myself wishing this was a K-series Core i3 instead, if only for the addition of Hyper-Threading. But then it’d also probably sell for $50 more, at least. Down at $75, Intel is clearly gunning for that unlocked Athlon X4, which sells $5 higher. It’s only unfortunate that you’ll want to pair the Pentium with a Z97- or Z87-based motherboard for overclocking. Right there, you’re looking at a $20 or $30 premium over nice A88X-based platforms.

Update: A number of readers brought up overclocking with H-series chipsets. It appears that certain boards, equipped with older microcode, will allow tuning of unlocked CPUs (against Intel's wishes). This capability is being treated as experimental, but could help bring down the cost of a Pentium-equipped platform versus pricier Z97-based options.

Although the Pentium gets kicked around in a few of our benchmarks, it does beat the Athlon in every game we test—sometimes by a lot. As a value-oriented gaming processor, this thing is just awesome. I’d love to see what Paul Henningsen could do with it in our System Builder Marathon, where he'd pick a more suitable graphics complement than the Titan I used to alleviate graphics bottlenecks. Powering a quiet, lightly-tuned home theater PC, it’d be right as rain. And although I wouldn’t want to rely on the G3258’s on-die HD Graphics engine, the chip’s Quick Sync technology is a real boon if you’re watching or converting video content.

For as long as Intel insisted on making enthusiasts pay a premium for K-series Core i5 and i7s, AMD had the market cornered on budget-friendly overclocking. The Pentium G3258 is a watershed moment for the company, though. It’s giving power users access to a powerful and efficient architecture, along with the freedom to tweak it, all at an inclusionary price point. The Pentium G3258 typifies what our Tom’s Hardware Smart Buy award is all about.