Results: Synthetics
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.
