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Intel Pentium Anniversary G3258

Intel Pentium Anniversary G3258 Review – Released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Intel’s Pentium brand, the Anniversary Edition soon had the attention of tweakers around the world. It turned out that this humble little birthday present was able to overclock by 40% with relative ease, turning it into quite the powerhouse. Note that it doesn’t have the K designation, but Intel released it with an unlocked multiplier.

Intel Pentium Anniversary G3258With a stock speed of 3.2GHz, this easy overclock bought it up to a blazing 4.6GHz or so, with many users even managing to hit a 50% overclock at 4.8GHz. There’s one catch though – it’s only a dual core critter, and doesn’t even have Hyperthreading to help alleviate the lack of processors when running normal desktop apps. It’s also got a relatively small cache, at just 3MB. We ran our Pentium at stock speeds, which showed that it’s still a potent little performer in single-threaded applications such as Cinebench R15’s single-thread test. However, heading to the GTAV benchmarks shows just how crippled this CPU is when it comes to games that are heavily reliant upon multi-threading. This test result was mirrored in 3DMark’s Physics test, which will eat up as many cores as you can throw at it.

Still, at just $90, this is our preferred chip for casual gaming, NAS and media boxes, especially once it’s been given a kick in the pants via overclocking. Sadly it’s not much good for anything else, even when compared against AMD’s relatively lacklustre offerings.

Pros

  • Incredibly cheap (just $90)
  • Amazing overclocker
  • Solid single-core performance

Cons

  • Only two cores
  • Lacking cache

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