SteveGrabowski

The Pentium G3258 gets high average framerates, so it looks acceptable in the most shallow of benchmarks. That average framerate number smoothes out the frametime variance so when you're jumping constantly between 30 FPS and 80 FPS that average comes out pretty high. My experience using a 4.4 GHz G3258 was good average framerates but hugely varying framerates and nasty stutter, neither of which shows up with my Xeon E3-1231v3. Eurogamer.net went into these average framerate results and how they didn't reflect the true gaming experience on an overclocked G3258 in pretty good depth in their G3258 review.
 
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-pentium-g3258-review

One of the plusses of getting your sneak skill high is being able to snipe him with the bow and not get caught. It's great with flaming arrows.

Sorry Linus, love your channel and the site, but this is a retarded build. Instead of wasting the $200 this G3258 + Z97 board cost might as well have spent $220 on an i5-4440 and a B85 board. No one on an extreme budget is going to be using SLI, so what's the point of Z97? Not a lot of value in this system.

Also, I'd recommend not buying an AMD card with an i3 (or even worse a Pentium). The DirectX11 overhead in the AMD drivers seems to be too much for anything less than an i5 to handle, though the Nvidia DX11 overhead seems lean enough to allow the i3 to still perform very well. See this article from Eurogamer where they discuss it:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-review
 
For this reason the extra 28 pounds for a GTX 960 instead of an R9 280 really makes a lot of sense. Now if you had an i5 build I would recommend the 280 above the 960 all day, but when building a budget system it's really important to try to play to your other components' strengths and minimize its weaknesses.
 
Sorry to recommend more expensive parts, but it gets you closer to a price to performance sweet spot. I cannot recommend Pentium G3258 for AAA gaming when you can't even launch Far Cry 4 nor Dragon Age Inquisition on a Pentium.

Hitman Absolution if I recall isn't that well parallelized compared to newer games, and the Pentium still struggles to keep up. The gulf between an OC Pentium-AE and a Haswell i3 just keeps getting wider and wider over time.

That's absolutely false. Hyperthreading isn't something a game has to implement; it's something controlled by the thread scheduling in Windows. Whether or not a game uses hyperthreading boils down to whether it uses enough threads. I have a hyperthreaded Xeon CPU, and from running Riva Tuner Stats Server while playing I can tell you most new games run 6-8 threads most of the time, and everything I have played released in the last couple of years runs at least three. Reddit is wrong, even on heavy overclocks a Pentium G3258 cannot keep up with an i3 clocked 1GHz lower. Here is a video a fellow poster, @i_build_nanosuits made by simulating a 4.5 GHz G3258 + GTX 780 using his i7-4770k by overclocking, disabling cores, and disabling hyperthreading. It's not a pretty sight. That low GPU load is indicative of a pretty serious bottleneck.
 

 
And it's accurate, based on my experience with my own 4.4 GHz G3258 with a GTX 970. Now contrast that to this video where he's playing BF4 with an i3-4130 + GTX 780.

Also, I'd recommend not buying an AMD card with an i3 (or even worse a Pentium). The DirectX11 overhead in the AMD drivers seems to be too much for anything less than an i5 to handle, though the Nvidia DX11 overhead seems lean enough to allow the i3 to still perform very well. See this article from Eurogamer where they discuss it:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-review
 
For this reason the extra 28 pounds for a GTX 960 instead of an R9 280 really makes a lot of sense. Now if you had an i5 build I would recommend the 280 above the 960 all day, but when building a budget system it's really important to try to play to your other components' strengths and minimize its weaknesses.
 
Sorry to recommend more expensive parts, but it gets you closer to a price to performance sweet spot. I cannot recommend Pentium G3258 for AAA gaming when you can't even launch Far Cry 4 nor Dragon Age Inquisition on a Pentium.

That's absolutely false. Hyperthreading isn't something a game has to implement; it's something controlled by the thread scheduling in Windows. Whether or not a game uses hyperthreading boils down to whether it uses enough threads. I have a hyperthreaded Xeon CPU, and from running Riva Tuner Stats Server while playing I can tell you most new games run 6-8 threads most of the time, and everything I have played released in the last couple of years runs at least three. Reddit is wrong, even on heavy overclocks a Pentium G3258 cannot keep up with an i3 clocked 1GHz lower. Here is a video a fellow poster, @i_build_nanosuits made by simulating a 4.5 GHz G3258 + GTX 780 using his i7-4770k by overclocking, disabling cores, and disabling hyperthreading. It's not a pretty sight. That low GPU load is indicative of a pretty serious bottleneck.
 

 
And it's accurate, based on my experience with my own 4.4 GHz G3258 with a GTX 970. Now contrast that to this video where he's playing BF4 with an i3-4130 + GTX 780.

And with the performance of 2, from Intel!
 

You better have a really nice motherboard too if you're putting the FX-9590 in it.

Wow, a $2300 system with a GTX 750 Ti and an $1800 system with a GTX 750? The author of this article should be shot.

Wow, a $2300 system with a GTX 750 Ti and an $1800 system with a GTX 750? The author of this article should be shot.

I gotta echo what George Carlin said, that I'd rather have my 10 year old watch two people have sex rather than have him see two people kill each other.

Wow, a $2300 system with a GTX 750 Ti and an $1800 system with a GTX 750? The author of this article should be shot.

Wow, a $2300 system with a GTX 750 Ti and an $1800 system with a GTX 750? The author of this article should be shot.

Wow, a $2300 system with a GTX 750 Ti and an $1800 system with a GTX 750? The author of this article should be shot.

Wow, a $2300 system with a GTX 750 Ti and an $1800 system with a GTX 750? The author of this article should be shot.

I would not recommend a reference-cooled 290 or 290X. They tend to run in the 90°C+ range under a heavy gaming load and either get unacceptably loud or throttle heavily. More than any other card, they really need third-party coolers.

You should buy an Nvidia GPU with an i3. The AMD DirectX11 driver crashes and burns with an i3 or lower when there is a lot of stuff on the screen. An R9 280 is overkill anyways for 768p. I'd go for a GTX 750 Ti, or perhaps a GTX 660.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202143
 
Also comes with GTA V and Dirt Rally

pc gamers are muppets at times, of course CDPR put money first, there a company.  if they didnt then they would go out of business.  naturally consoles come first there is more money to be made there, than on PC and really why would you put PC first? piracy is rife, steam takes its pound of flesh, a good chunk of pc gamers wait for steam sales or the like and then you have to deal entitled PC gamers who think every game should push there pc to the limit regardless of how much work needs to go into it. as an example just look at GTA5 and how long that took to get to PC
 
its simple, promos are like adverts, they are meant to sell the product not give you an honest review. stop pre-ordering and wait for a release you impatient fools, and if you dont like what they did dont buy it.

because a 2 year-old promo is considered a promise.
 
you're all entitled little shits.

Who gives a fuck.
 
The game still looks great, and more than a few of you will be struggling to run it as is even with more powerful hardware than consoles.
 
This isn't some new phenomenon that began in 2014.  This happens everytime a new console launches.  Devs always overestimate the hardware and it makes way more sense as a developer to make one spec for the game.  It's not as simple as turning off features on consoles, if they abandoned tessellation on certain objects then they have to go and remake those assets to still look good without it.  Likewise with real time water reflections versus non-real time reflections etc.   One design spec makes the most sense.  Boohoo, you lost some fluffy shadow effects.  Go throw your fucking PC out a window while you have your tantrum.
 
By all means though, feel free to boycott the game if it really bothers you that they removed some fluffy rendering features.  Don't be these guys and actually back up your whining with your wallet:
 

Yeah, you're right

Probably not. Don't believe the hype on system requirements before a game is released; wait for actual benchmarks. Everyone was freaking out when Shadow of Mordor was recommending an i7-3770 and once it released we came to find out it runs just as well on an i3.