Pentium K gaming review from Bit-Tech

[Martini1991]

To celebrate our anniversary, we're lifting our self imposed multiplier lock on our low end cpu and also charging more for it.

Cheers Intel, how gracious of you.

Negative nelly spin

 

[PCZ]

It is so true though.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It's not misleading, they BOTH lose, the difference makes is the is noting the Pentium does that a K series i5 can't, wheras AMD don't actually have a CPU that can match it in single/dual core performance when over clocked (4.8GHz Haswell is > 5GHz on Piledriver).

It is misleading since there are plenty of locked CPUs like the Core i5s which might not be any better. Or are you going to ignore the majority of locked Intel CPUs on purpose.

Lets make a list of currently available SKUs it might beat or match:

1.)Core i5-3330
2.)Core i5-3340
3.)Core i5-3350P
4.)Core i5-3450
5.)Core i5-3470
6.)Core i5-3550
7.)Core i5-3570
8.)Core i5-4430
9.)Core i5-4440
10.)Core i5-4460
11.)Core i5-4570
12.)Core i5-4590
13.)Core i5-4670
14.)Core i5-4690


What you should have said:

A £60 Intel CPU is beating AMD's top CPU and many locked Intel Core i5s in gaming benchmarks, what parallel dimension have I stumbled into? lmao.

But OFC you made sure you quietly forgot about the Intel part.

that uses 2 cores or less (the majority of games)

That's a bit of a leap, personally I bought the 4930K because I wanted it to last a long time, not for my WoW FPS.

Well that's actually the opposite of what I said but /meh.

Yet you bought a six core Core i7. You know very well where games are heading and contradicted your first statement by spending £300+ on a CPU.

Why don't you disable 4 of the cores and HT on your Core i7 and get a higher two core overclock then?

You bought the CPU since you are hedging your bets where games are heading.

Yes but all four will need the settings turned down, the fact the C2Q's lasted longer before requiring an upgrade doesn't change the fact that upgrading has been worth it for all four since Sandy arrived, the benefits of C2Q over C2D are greatly exagerated, anyone still using either is holding out.

Wrong since I had mine until 2011,when my motherboard started playing up a bit.

They lasted one round more of card upgrades than the Core2s.

The Q6600 was far more playable in many games when compared to the higher clocked E6300d.

You don't even believe what you are saying to an extreme degree.

Most of us hedge our bets with Core i5s!!

You don't need >4GHz to play anything, it's just advantageous as it allows higher settings.

Games with very low graphical requirements are also usually not very taxing on the CPU either, If the argument here is that the extra overclocking of the Pentium is mute then a person building a system focusing on those games would be better off saving even more and getting a Celeron...

Most of the games on Steam do have lowish requirements - one of my mates actually has around 800 games,ie,around 25% of all Steam games.

Regarding the Celeron I have said before on a few occasions on forums,especially if you intend to upgrade.

Or alternatively just upgrade your older Core2/Phenom II based PC with a better card.

Best thing to do first and see if the games run much better and much easier,unless the game really needs massive CPU power.

Then upgrade the platform later if the upgrade is not enough.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It will also cost more too and be outperformed in many games.

The i5/i3/Pentium (OC) are all GPU limited there.

Wrong especially as the G3258 has worse frametimes with a Geforce Titan.


ARMA 3

BF4 single player

GRID2

Metro:Last Light

Thief

Tombraider

WoW

Better frametimes in many games and higher framerates too.

Or are frametimes and frametime distribution not important any more??

BTW,the G3258 stutters with Thief - look at the huge spikes!!

Look at games like Watch Dogs - no pure dual core can really run the game.

With the XBox One and PS4 now starting to become the lead game dev platforms,DX12 and Mantle in the next year or so,the Core i3 will have enough legs to accommodate those games at some level.

The Pentium dual core probably won't and people will have to upgrade sooner rather than later.

All for what £20 to £25??

The G3258 only makes sense for very specific games like WoT,but then you better pray that no major changes happen to the engine in the next two years.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

One thing I would like to point out is that the example of Q6600 and E8400 is not a like for like comparison for the current situation.

The Q6600 and E8400 were both priced at around the same price of around £140~ back then, but here what we got is Pentium-K at under £60 vs i3 at £90 vs non-K i5 at £130+ and i5-K at £170+.

As for the Pentium K vs Athlon 750, despite both might be around same price, but the Pentium would be on a better platform with future upgrade path (while the AMD does not), and it would be faster in light-threaded games, and more or less match the 750 in higher threaded games. If people was planning the build for heavy usage and expect it to last for years to come, then those people should be getting the i5 (or i7 even) in the first place; the Pentium K is not for that kind of requirement, being just a budget sub £60 CPU. It's like if you dine at a pub restaurant and paying only £6-£8 for a meal, you know what you are expecting...you can't compare it to quality of restaurant that would cost you £15+. The £6-£8 meal at the pub restaurant might not be high quality, bit it doesn't mean they are not good in terms of standards for the price they are charging.

The same crowd were pimping the E7300 too and even the E5300 over the Q6600. However,history is now re-written to accommodate the G3258,so the Q6600 wasn't the legendary CPU it was,but merely meh.

The E8400 was used as an example as it had 25% higher core clockspeed,greater IPC and overclocked 20% higher on average while using less cooling(but it needed newer motherboards).

It had much better single core performance.

Plus I had a higher clocked E6300 against a lower clocked Q6600 in two rigs until late 2011. Guess what faired better with an overclocked HD5850?

No body is saying to buy an X4 750K as it is an outdated CPU,but it shows that even an ancient quad core with yesterdays performance is still matching(or even beating in frametimes) the uber budget CPU of doom,the G3258. The X4 750K was around £55 to £60 for over a year.

The X4 750K lacks L3 cache and is beaten in many games by Phenom II X4s and their Intel equivalents from before 2012.

Also,many of you have not built as many budget rigs as you think. Plenty of people expect their cheapish rigs to last(since many have consoles too),so if their CPU starts becoming an issue in 12 months or so they won't be happy. Don't believe me?? Look at the PC market,year on year the desktop market has been declining, eaten up by laptops and tablets.

Desktops are being kept longer and longer and people expect even cheapish desktops to last.

I have done so many of those builds in real life and on forums,consoles have really changed the way people think about desktop longevity.

Many people don't even upgrade their CPUs FFS.

People keep ignoring the frametimes in the TH review,and even in lightly threaded games,the Core i3 is doing better. Very few games are showing a G3258 being faster(if you can get a massive overclock),over the Core i3 and OFC then it makes more sense to buy the Pentium. The problem is even then the HT is still making a difference,which people are repeatedly ignoring and at a massively lower clockspeed.

Plus you also forget,the Core i3s used to be closer to £100,and the Pentiums were like £55 to £65.

Now,the Core i3s can dip to almost £70.

Edit!!

Another thing.

People also forget the G6950 and the Core i3 530.

The former could hit similar clockspeeds,and was cheaper than the latter.

People still recommended the latter over the former.

I wonder which has aged better?

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

To celebrate our anniversary, we're lifting our self imposed multiplier lock on our low end cpu and also charging more for it.

Cheers Intel, how gracious of you.

It works though,they know how the market will respond(I called it before the launch about the response). They know people will get overexcited about this just because Intel allowed overclocking on a sub £150 part after nearly 3.5 to 4 years,and will ignore any disadvantages to this,just since they need to get people to buy it.

Why?? I think secretly they worry if it is not a massive success then Intel won't bother unlocking any more sub £150 chips,so I kind of understand from that viewpoint though.

Intel are also no fools. They are masters of market segmentation. They know multi-threading is important - they helped develop TSX FFS! They are doing a lot more than many companies in pushing it forward. Even MIC is basically multiple depreciated X86 cores(dozens of them).

They are also trying to get a potential upgrade market going with this chip. It will hit issues sooner rather than later in the next 6 to 18 months time.

By then,I wonder if the Intel PR will soon start pointing out on their slides,on how their Core i5 is a "perfect" slot in upgrade as its X amount faster in the latest games??

They can get people to spend more with them,by hooking people in with a "cheap" entry price.

The reason there is no K series Core i3,is because that would have a long enough lifespan to not need an upgrade for a few years.

If my Core i3 had been overclockable I would still be using it now instead of getting a Core i5.

 

[PCZ]

It works though,they know how the market will respond(I called it before the launch about the response). They know people will get overexcited about this just because Intel allowed overclocking on a sub £150 part after nearly 3.5 to 4 years,and will ignore any disadvantages to this,just since they need to get people to buy it.

Why?? I think secretly they worry if it is not a massive success then Intel won't bother unlocking any more sub £150 chips,so I kind of understand from that viewpoint though.

So we should all buy one so that Intel will be encouraged to unlock another sub £150 CPU that we might actually want

 

[ubersonic]

What you should have said:

I am going to be brutally honest here so want to make it clear I am not deliberately attempting to offend: I really didn't think anyone reading would be dumb enough to not realise that was inferred in what I said. If somebody makes a comment on a car being faster than every Honda you can tell from that its also faster than most Ferraris.

Yet you bought a six core Core i7. You know very well where games are heading and contradicted your first statement by spending £300+ on a CPU.

I bought the CPU because it wasn't much more than a LGA2011 quad core and would perform better for folding and virtualization, if I was just a gamer I would have bought an i5.

You bought the CPU since you are hedging your bets where games are heading.

Actually I think it will be outperformed by quads before the majority of games can take advantage just like the LGA1366 hex core i7's were, gaming wasn't my primary concern.

Wrong since I had mine until 2011,when my motherboard started playing up a bit.

The fact you didn't mind using a 4 year old CPU doesn't really mean that upgrading to Sandy wouldn't have been worth it, in 2011 both C2D's and C2Q's bottlenecked with top GPU's.

They lasted one round more of card upgrades than the Core2s.

Debatable, they both bottlenecked top GPU's before the C2Q offered an advantage in a notable amount of games.

The Q6600 was far more playable in many games when compared to the higher clocked E6300d.

An E8400 would have been too.

Most of us hedge our bets with Core i5s!!

So your advice to somebody thinking o buying a £60 CPU is to get a £130-£180 one?

Wrong

It was 100% correct, it's just it was said in relation to the graph you linked at the time not the 600 ones you linked a few posts later, Precognition is not one of my talents

 

[nails666]

The same crowd were pimping the E7300 too and even the E5300 over the Q6600. However,history is now re-written to accommodate the G3258,so the Q6600 wasn't the legendary CPU it was,but merely meh.

Eh, I think you're starting to take all this a bit personally Cat, no one is trying to re-write history, you're the one who keeps bringing up the E5300 vs Q6600 argument, no one else is.
My feeling is that people are just pleasently suprised that there is a new budget chip that we as overclockers can have some fun with and get decent performance from in certain cases. Nothing more than that, nobody is suggesting we should all be ditching 4790ks in favour of it or that the future of gaming is not going to be more and heavily threaded and that yes the Pentium is going to struggle as that happens. It's just a £50 fun chip to play with and for some very budget concious buyers could be a decent short/medium term solution.

 

[ubersonic]

Eh, I think you're starting to take all this a bit personally Cat, no one is trying to re-write history, you're the one who keeps bringing up the E5300 vs Q6600 argument, no one else is.
My feeling is that people are just pleasently suprised that there is a new budget chip that we as overclockers can have some fun with and get decent performance from in certain cases. Nothing more than that, nobody is suggesting we should all be ditching 4790ks in favour of it or that the future of gaming is not going to be more and heavily threaded and that yes the Pentium is going to struggle as that happens. It's just a £50 fun chip to play with and for some very budget concious buyers could be a decent short/medium term solution.

This ^

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I am going to be brutally honest here so want to make it clear I am not deliberately attempting to offend: I really didn't think anyone reading would be dumb enough to not realise that was inferred in what I said. If somebody makes a comment on a car being faster than every Honda you can tell from that its also faster than most Ferraris.

But nobody should be dumb enough to ignore other CPUs too. Your the one one who brought up the AMD chips,when there are over a dozen Core i5s alone which might be beaten too. I know its popular to have a dig at them since they are in decline,but plenty of people reading that comment would not realise that technically there were more expensive Intel chips which would suffer the same fate.

I bought the CPU because it wasn't much more than a LGA2011 quad core and would perform better for folding and virtualization, if I was just a gamer I would have bought an i5.




Actually I think it will be outperformed by quads before the majority of games can take advantage just like the LGA1366 hex core i7's were, gaming wasn't my primary concern.

Yet you still would not get a dual core for gaming. Thats the thing. But fair enough on why you got the six core core i7.

The fact you didn't mind using a 4 year old CPU doesn't really mean that upgrading to Sandy wouldn't have been worth it, in 2011 both C2D's and C2Q's bottlenecked with top GPU's.

Debatable, they both bottlenecked top GPU's before the C2Q offered an advantage in a notable amount of games.

Plenty of people actually still game on older CPUs.

It still does not change the fact the Core2 duos were still less playable than the Core2 quads in many newer games.

The Core2 quads could survive a card upgrade,the Core2s for many newer games did not.

I only tend to upgrade when things start to get unplayable,or in my case the motherboard started failing.

An E8400 would have been too.

Mate had an E8400 and he needed to upgrade before me. We both played similar types of games.

So your advice to somebody thinking o buying a £60 CPU is to get a £130-£180 one?

Nope they can buy a £70 to £80 one.

It was 100% correct, it's just it was said in relation to the graph you linked at the time not the 600 ones you linked a few posts later, Precognition is not one of my talents

I only linked to two graphs earlier - both for WoW??

Thats the thing though,even in WoW which uses two to three threads,the massive clockspeed advantage is not helping the G3258.

That means the Core i3 is a better hedge.

Edit!!

We need to agree to disagree here.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Eh, I think you're starting to take all this a bit personally Cat, no one is trying to re-write history, you're the one who keeps bringing up the E5300 vs Q6600 argument, no one else is.
My feeling is that people are just pleasently suprised that there is a new budget chip that we as overclockers can have some fun with and get decent performance from in certain cases. Nothing more than that, nobody is suggesting we should all be ditching 4790ks in favour of it or that the future of gaming is not going to be more and heavily threaded and that yes the Pentium is going to struggle as that happens. It's just a £50 fun chip to play with and for some very budget concious buyers could be a decent short/medium term solution.

I can understand that viewpoint and if ubersonic has the same viewpoint fair enough.

But what concerns me,is that people ignore chips like the Core i3 for example,when people are asking for advice on a budget build to last a few years.

I can see the Core i3 being a better hedge of sorts,giving good lightly threaded performance and enough of a multi-threaded improvement via HT,so that people can actually run some newer games.

It does not cost that much more. For example I would rather prefer getting a Core i3 4130 and a R9 270X,than say a G3258 and a GTX760 for example.

If it were an ultra budget rig and it was the difference between a £40 and a £60 to £65 GPU I would concede your point too.

Plus the other thing is I expect the Core i3 to hold a greater percentage of its value over time too,especially in the next two years. I had my Core i3 for nearly two years and it held a surprisingly decent amount of its value.

 

[UTmaniac]

Conspiracy theory: Some early batches of 4790K are running hot when overclocked, word spreads like wildfire in the overclocking forums, so more wary forum members get swayed into buying the G3258 with a Z97 motherboards (knowing they have a future cpu upgrade path).

 

[nails666]

Conspiracy theory: Some early batches of 4790K are running hot when overclocked, word spreads like wildfire in the overclocking forums, so more wary forum members get swayed into buying the G3258 with a Z97 motherboards (knowing they have a future cpu upgrade path).

Funnily enough that is pretty much exactly what I'm going to do although for financial rather than conspiricy reasons
I've got an MSI Z97 Gaming 7 board and Corsair H75 sitting waiting for a new system and the original plan was to go for a 4790k. However the finances haven't worked out quite right (just moved house) so I'll probably now just go for the Pentium. With that board and cooling I should hopefully be able to get a decent overclock and it'll tide me over for a few months either until I can afford a 4790k or maybe even until Broadwell next year.
I have strongly considered going for an i3, indeed I've just built a budget WoW gaming machine with a 4330 for my wife, but it somehow just seems a bit boring to go for locked chip with that board. Will mean that I'll be able to do a decent comparison of the 2 chips though. My Pentium will be paired with a 6950 and my wifes i3 will be with a 270X so should be fairly similar overall.

 

[pandem0nium]

I'd be interested to see how this compares against a phenom ii x 4, which you can get used for similar money.

 

[pandem0nium]

Just picked up a phenom ii x6 95w for £50 off the bay, I know what I'd choose out of the two

 

[233]

Interesting to note that the oem chips in stock are 15% dearer than the retails

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

BTW,Tonester0011 if you do test PS2,try the new Hossin continent,with 24+ people - it seems really taxing on hardware.

 

[colinmcr]

Which board would you put one in if your were doing a just for fun to make it scream?

 

[tribz]

Would this work in a Z87 board ?