Haswell Unlocked Pentium Dual Core G3258 / Pentium-K: A Budget Gamer's Dream?

Well, some of you may be aware of the Devil's Canyon based Haswells that hit the market. But Intel also came with what could be a CPU aimed at Budget gamers.

The new Pentium Dual Core G3258
But you can call it a Pentium K

It was initially dubbed as the Pentium Anniversary Edition but the SKU has been given a designation as the G3258. Now basically, the G3258 is a G3240 and the 3420, same specs being a 3.2GHz Dual-Core CPU, having 3 Megs of Cache, and a HD Graphics running on a 350MHz - 1150MHz. But here is where things get a little different.

Now although the G3258 doesn't have the K Designation on its SKU, treat it like it has one because it is fully unlocked and unleashed. Slick from LinusTechTips dubbed it the "Pentium K" which is apt due to that reason. Only thing about it that does put some users off is that it requires a Z97-based Motherboard in order to overclock it. And Z97 boards are not cheap, depending where you look and what motherboards that are offered. However, cumulatively, the price compared to the i3 4330 and a H87/97 boards will be slightly lower. And word has gotten from Board Partners that they are creating BIOS-es that allow the H87/H97 Boards to overclock it, so keep your eyes open for any updates.

It is designed to be overclockable even on a stock cooler to keep costs down even further. Now when overclocked, it can still compete with an i3 4330 in Synthetic benches. However in terms of CPU Coolers concerned, I absolutely will not, and will never endorse using the stock wimpy coolers supplied by Intel. A Bigger Down Draft firing cooler, (Not even a tower is really needed) will fit the bill just fine. Something like a MassCool 8W553B1M3 will be fine.

Gaming however, is where Pentium G3258 is practically geared towards. When heavily overclocked, though it will still generally fall behind the bigger brothers like the Core i5 4670/4690, but not too much. It'll still put up a show.

At the price of around USD 75 give or take, this will be the sweet spot and will directly compete with the AMD APU (minus the GPU) based Athlon X4 750K. Games that are also CPU bound will enjoy the performance boost as you overclock it heavily.

Some reviews have appeared with regards to the CPU. This link (Polish One that was translated to English) pits the G3258 with other CPUs that were generally affordable, including an outrageous comparison with the 8-Core AMD FX-8000 Flagship 8350. Of course in heavily threaded loads it's not gonna match up but In terms of just pure gaming alone, a baby Pentium Overclocked to 4.7GHz handily beats the 8350 in a large majority of the benchmarks thrown by the reviwers that it's not even funny.

http://pclab.pl/art57691.html

Hexus even pit it against a Core i7 4770K:
http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/70977-intel-pentium-anniversary-edition-g3258/?page=7

Of course Integrated Graphics is not gonna obviously do any good but scroll all the way to the bottom where Hexus slams a GTX 750 Ti in, there's barely any difference in FPS count in certain games between the G3258, Core i5 4690 and Core i7 4770K.

So yeah. Go figure.

BOTTOMLINE

So if you're on a budget, and you want something that can perform very well in games as CPU hooked to a dedicated GPU, this should fit most budget builds. I've actually Ditched my AMD Build for this CPU which I pre-ordered from Amazon, cause' this seems to be a fun chip to play around a bit. Although it may be 2 cores, but overclocking this thing will bring itself closer to the 4 cores in gaming. Moreover, the CPU's TDP as such will not be so high anyways compared to the AMD CPUs I'm initially planning to get. I'm just like getting a CPU, Motherboard, Storage, PSU and Case, that's it. I've already have a couple of GPUs with me, but it'll be nice if Kitguru sends me one of their 2 R9 280s. With that I can have better data whether this CPU will hold the GPU back in performance as I now have a Radeon 6850, Radeon 5850 and a GTX 780, so I need something in between the 5850 and the GTX 780.