Question about upgrading

[PMoneyMillionaire]

My friend bought an old hp prebuilt computer a while back and has since seen the light of PC gaming. the first 2 things he bought to upgrade his computer were a new psu (500w) and gtx 760. He's now left with a cpu that he plans on upgrading. He has an AMD A8 5500 cooled by a 212 evo and plans to upgrade to the recently released Pentium G3258. Thoughts?

[MuZeVII]

The G3258 will beat the A8 5500 on a core-by-core basis, just make sure to take advantage of its overclocking prowess. HOWEVER, it's worth noting that if your friend ever has multithreaded workloads, moving from a Quad core to a Dual core w/out Hyperthreading may be detrimental in some circumstances. For gaming with a dedicated GPU, sure he may squeeze out a few extra FPS, but with the necessity of buying a new motherboard in addition to the chip, I'm not sure it's worth the change.

[Supersonic494]

The G3258 will beat the A8 5500 on a core-by-core basis, just make sure to take advantage of its overclocking prowess. HOWEVER, it's worth noting that if your friend ever has multithreaded workloads, moving from a Quad core to a Dual core w/out Hyperthreading may be detrimental in some circumstances. For gaming with a dedicated GPU, sure he may squeeze out a few extra FPS, but with the necessity of buying a new motherboard in addition to the chip, I'm not sure it's worth the change.

Hello, I am the friend in question. I am already planing on switching over to Intel for a million other reasons, would it be a good idea for me to switch to this as a way to cheaply make my way to intel, and then in the future I couple sell it and switch to an i5?

[Shd0w2]

Hello, I am the friend in question. I am already planing on switching over to Intel for a million other reasons, would it be a good idea for me to switch to this as a way to cheaply make my way to intel, and then in the future I couple sell it and switch to an i5?

Yes, that is a reason the pentium anniversery is a great starter.

[MuZeVII]

Hello, I am the friend in question. I am already planing on switching over to Intel for a million other reasons, would it be a good idea for me to switch to this as a way to cheaply make my way to intel, and then in the future I couple sell it and switch to an i5?

If you are determined to switch to Intel, then yes that is certainly a good route. The G3258 is relatively inexpensive and could serve as a good placeholder while you save the budget for a 4690K for example. Both run on the Z97 chipset, so you could use the same motherboard for both CPUs. If you're worried about the hardware becoming outdated while you save, then don't; the unreleased Broadwell series of CPUs will also run on the Z97 chipset. I hope this helps