Pentium G3258: Really Impressed

[burnttoastnice]

So I've just upgraded from a puny Core 2 Duo e6320 w/ 2GB RAM to a Pentium G3258 w/ 4GB RAM. I am impressed to say the least.

The windows install was very quick. Like, lightning quick. The loading bar sailed from 0 to 100% within at least 10 minutes.

 

I had my friend come over with his i7 laptop (Don't know the specific cpu number)  and with my i5-3337u laptop, we used Cinebench to see which CPU was faster at rendering. Setting the OC to a reasonable 3.8GHz, the PC sailed past both laptops - after stumbling quite a bit in the centre of the render image. I was actually quite surprised, since both laptops had 4 logical cores (thanks to Hyperthreading) but the Pentium only had 2 physical cores and was holding up a clear lead. My i5 finished off with 214cb (whatever that means), and the Pentium build finished off with 275cb. After another overclock up to 4GHz it landed at 286cb.

 

I got a bit too carried away with the overclocking and ended up reaching 100C at about 4.7GHz (I'm using an aftermarket tower cooler - but the fan profile in the BIOS was set to silent at the time ) with overclocks above that resulting in instant boot screen BSoDs.

 

I'm really happy that I got this CPU I'll be saving up for a better aftermarket cooler and crank right back up to 4.7GHz. I haven't got a card in the build at the minute - but the RX480 seems like an excellent option for this budget system. I'm planning to upgrade to 8GB RAM at some point in the future

 

 

Have any of you guys got the g3258? How are you finding it?

[TheRandomness]

The slight issue is the G3258 is nothing but an overclockers toy. Some games wont even run on it.

[Starelementpoke]

4 minutes ago, burnttoastnice said:

So I've just upgraded from a puny Core 2 Duo e6320 w/ 2GB RAM to a Pentium G3258 w/ 4GB RAM. I am impressed to say the least.

The windows install was very quick. Like, lightning quick. The loading bar sailed from 0 to 100% within at least 10 minutes.

 

I had my friend come over with his i7 laptop (Don't know the specific cpu number)  and with my i5-3337u laptop, we used Cinebench to see which CPU was faster at rendering. Setting the OC to a reasonable 3.8GHz, the PC sailed past both laptops - after stumbling quite a bit in the centre of the render image. I was actually quite surprised, since both laptops had 4 logical cores (thanks to Hyperthreading) but the Pentium only had 2 physical cores and was holding up a clear lead. My i5 finished off with 214cb (whatever that means), and the Pentium build finished off with 275cb. After another overclock up to 4GHz it landed at 286cb.

 

I got a bit too carried away with the overclocking and ended up reaching 100C at about 4.7GHz (I'm using an aftermarket tower cooler - but the fan profile in the BIOS was set to silent at the time ) with overclocks above that resulting in instant boot screen BSoDs.

 

I'm really happy that I got this CPU I'll be saving up for a better aftermarket cooler and crank right back up to 4.7GHz. I haven't got a card in the build at the minute - but the RX480 seems like an excellent option for this budget system. I'm planning to upgrade to 8GB RAM at some point in the future

 

 

Have any of you guys got the g3258? How are you finding it?

I think you can reach that score with a Q6600 on Cinebench with an OC to 3ghz.

[bgibbz]

5 minutes ago, burnttoastnice said:

So I've just upgraded from a puny Core 2 Duo e6320 w/ 2GB RAM to a Pentium G3258 w/ 4GB RAM. I am impressed to say the least.

The windows install was very quick. Like, lightning quick. The loading bar sailed from 0 to 100% within at least 10 minutes.

 

I had my friend come over with his i7 laptop (Don't know the specific cpu number)  and with my i5-3337u laptop, we used Cinebench to see which CPU was faster at rendering. Setting the OC to a reasonable 3.8GHz, the PC sailed past both laptops - after stumbling quite a bit in the centre of the render image. I was actually quite surprised, since both laptops had 4 logical cores (thanks to Hyperthreading) but the Pentium only had 2 physical cores and was holding up a clear lead. My i5 finished off with 214cb (whatever that means), and the Pentium build finished off with 275cb. After another overclock up to 4GHz it landed at 286cb.

 

I got a bit too carried away with the overclocking and ended up reaching 100C at about 4.7GHz (I'm using an aftermarket tower cooler - but the fan profile in the BIOS was set to silent at the time ) with overclocks above that resulting in instant boot screen BSoDs.

 

I'm really happy that I got this CPU I'll be saving up for a better aftermarket cooler and crank right back up to 4.7GHz. I haven't got a card in the build at the minute - but the RX480 seems like an excellent option for this budget system. I'm planning to upgrade to 8GB RAM at some point in the future

 

 

Have any of you guys got the g3258? How are you finding it?

Pentiums are notoriously good overclocking CPUs, and with a solid OC they can actually be very good. I have upgraded many old pcs by simply paying 40$ for a high end cooler and overclocking the sh!t out of the pentium, then throw in a 200$ gpu and you have quite a powerul machine. 

[rtpb5642]

Its good for general use but gaming no. I have one and use it for a minecraft server its quite fast.

[Nena Trinity]

5 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

The slight issue is the G3258 is nothing but an overclockers toy. Some games wont even run on it.

This! :3 (its still not the worst CPU tough)

[burnttoastnice]

3 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

The slight issue is the G3258 is nothing but an overclockers toy. Some games wont even run on it.

At the moment I'm just playing a few online mmo's and GTA San Andreas - but that's defo going to be a problem for newer games .

[minibois]

7 minutes ago, burnttoastnice said:

At the moment I'm just playing a few online mmo's and GTA San Andreas - but that's defo going to be a problem for newer games .

Yeah, those games run good on it because most MMO's are fairly light weight or focused on a couple cores and San Andreas comes fro ma time where dual cores were the mainstream thing.

Newer stuff like GTA V will not run good and other games like Far Cry 4 may not even run without some tweaking. That is why I wouldn't ever recommend this CPU to a gamer.

[NumLock21]

From your old cpu to the new G3258, of course it's going to be fast, it's a few generations newer, but I still won't recommend anyone buying it. It's a expensive placeholder, when you can just grab a celeron, for around $50 dollars and it's still a dual core just like the G3258. My old Xeon X3350 when oc to 3.8GHz get me CB R15 score of 411. Highest G3258 score is 423 OC to 5.48GHz by ProKoN.

 

 

[don_svetlio]

Overpriced for office use
Terrible for gaming due to the low core/thread count
Old product

The only reason the it managed to beat the laptops is that you are comparing a 60W Pentium to 15W ULV chips. If you lock the Pentium at 15W it would get crushed so hard it won't even be funny. Currently, any APU/Athlon is superior and even C2Q are a better alternative due to the thread count. Dual-cores are dead.

[Prysin]

@burnttoastnice

Cancer can also be very impressive. Still doesnt mean it is something you should go out of your way to celebrate.

 

 

[don_svetlio]

36 minutes ago, Minibois said:

Yeah, those games run good on it because most MMO's are fairly light weight or focused on a couple cores and San Andreas comes fro ma time where dual cores were the mainstream thing.

Newer stuff like GTA V will not run good and other games like Far Cry 4 may not even run without some tweaking. That is why I wouldn't ever recommend this CPU to a gamer.

GTA V and other newer games have horrible stuttering with the Pentium

[don_svetlio]

45 minutes ago, bgibbz said:

Pentiums are notoriously good overclocking CPUs, and with a solid OC they can actually be very good. I have upgraded many old pcs by simply paying 40$ for a high end cooler and overclocking the sh!t out of the pentium, then throw in a 200$ gpu and you have quite a powerul machine. 

Which Pentiums are those? Seeing as almost all of them have locked multipliers?

[g12601]

So with the whole "dual cores are becoming useless" thing. Then there is this video.

 

[Yoinkerman]

I'm pretty happy with the two I have.  One is a htpc and the other is an htpc/gaming.  I don't play any of the games that hard lock you out for not having a 4 core so it works really well.

[don_svetlio]

2 minutes ago, g12601 said:

So with the whole "dual cores are becoming useless" thing. Then there is this video.

 

HD 4400? Yeah, I call BS on that

[SteveGrabowski0]

You will massively bottleneck an RX 480. I know because I ran my 4.4 GHz G3258 (on stock cooling at 1.18V) with a GTX 970 for a week or so when newegg was really slow shipping my Xeon. The gameplay experience was terrible with any kind of recent game. Just massive frame drops and horrible gpu utilization. The framerate would constantly just swing between 40 and 90 fps, it was much worse than playing on a console where you usually get a steady 30 fps. @i_build_nanosuits did a video where he disabled two cores and hyperthreading on his i7-4770k and OC to 4.5 GHz, and the results weren't pretty, but they were consistent with my experience using an actual G3258 at 4.5 GHz.

 

And the RX 480 is going to be a better gpu than the GTX 970 almost certainly. AMD dirvers also have more overhead in DX11 games, which will make AMD gpus perform worse than Nvidia gpus of a similar performance class when used with low end cpus. It's not a problem when you match AMD gpus with i5 or better, but is with i3 or lower. My G3258 is an my HTPC on the living room TV now, where it absolutely excels in running emulators due to the massively strong per core core performance of an OC G3258.

[SteveGrabowski0]

Anyways, the difference in gaming performance was night and day with my G3258 @ 4.4 GHz vs my 3.6 GHz Xeon E3-1231v3 when combined with my GTX 970. The Xeon plays games beautifully, the Pentium was just frustrating to use in modern games.

[minibois]

50 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

GTA V and other newer games have horrible stuttering with the Pentium

Yeah. that's why I would not recommend it to any gamer really  Even if they say they only play old games or games that only use two cores, you may still want to play something else in the future

[Arc_Jester]

A G3258 will bottleneck the shit out of a RX 480 no matter how much you try to OC it. It would make a hell of a lot more sense to get at least an I3.