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G3258 still a great budget gaming chip?

almoststew1990

almoststew1990

almoststew1990

Soldato
Joined
12 May 2011
Posts
6,281
Location
Southampton
I'm going second hand so I can get one of these and and a basic overclocking motherboard for £70. This seems like great value to me- are these chips, when overclocked, still great for gaming?
 
There perfectly capable of gaming but games like the newer gta v tend to run smoother on higher threaded processors . I have one paired up in the htpc with a 270x and I run everything I want give or take tweaks in settings , had no problem pushing hardline on that setup at 60fps high settings
 
Thanks for the info. How many games will require a quad core or hyperthreading? For some reason things like i5 750 on 1156 are really cheap and can be overclocked to 3.5+GHz (but the motherboards expensive). Would this be a better option?
 
I've found a PC on Gumtree for £65 that has a basic 1155 motherboard and a Pentium G870 3.1GHz sandy chip, plus the case, and HDD, Windows Licence that I would have needed. I think I might swap in a non K sandy or ivy i5 in it :) I can sell the RAM and AMD 6450 to make back a couple of quid.
 
I've got a Pentium Anni and have it with a Titan Black. Yeah, I know that sounds really silly but from what I've seen so far I am incredibly impressed. I've got mine overclocked to 4.2ghz and here's what I have so far (expect a full write up at a later date)

Hitman absolute max settings 4xmsaa



And Dirt 3, same settings.



I've no doubt I can trip it up at some point but early indications are this is a cracking gaming CPU.
 
Honestly,just no unless it is some game which really needs one thread to run on. Unless you intend to replace it soon in the next year,more and more games are not running well on it. Just get a Core i3 and be done with it. A Core i3 will run Total War or GTAV OKish,but a Pentium dual core won't,and they are the same CPUs(dual core) but the Core i3 has HT.
 
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CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
Honestly,just no unless it is some game which really needs one thread to run on. Unless you intend to replace it soon in the next year,more and more games are not running well on it. Just get a Core i3 and be done with it. A Core i3 will run Total War or GTAV OKish,but a Pentium dual core won't,and they are the same CPUs(dual core) but the Core i3 has HT.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what I would rather have, HT or a much higher clock speed.

TBH? I3s are usually clocked pretty low. A Pentium can run at up to 4.8ghz which I would imagine would offset the HT quite well.

Gonna fire up my micro PC now and install Sleeping Dogs, see what I can get out of that.

Edit. Not bad, not bad at all. Extreme setting preset used.



IMO I would take the Pentium over the I3. I'm running a Titan Black and only 4gb physical ram and let's face it this is a seriously odd combo. However, min FPS have been more than good enough so paired with something like a 750ti you would have a decent little rig. Still running benchmarks, next up will be Mafia II. I know it's old but Physx still takes its toll in the game.
 
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Wouldn't an AMD A10-7850K be a better gaming cpu than the G3258 for most things (I'm aware that no games can make use of the iGPU for floating point calculations while you're using a dedicated GPU yet).

Just feel that 2 cores for the large amount of games is restricting yourself too much for mordern games.

Disclaimer; don't know how much A10's are second hand so they may not even be in the same budget at all.
 
If you are buying second hand you should be looking at 2500k 2600k 2700k

If buying new a G3258 + something like the £60 gigabyte Z97P-D3 board is fine if you plan on replacing the g3258 with a quad down the line the board will overclock any haswell/broadwell fine only snag is not good for xfire/sli gpu's not a problem if you prefer single card rigs.

I wouldn't invest in an expensive z97 board it's already a semi dead socket albeit the haswell quads will be good enough for a few years but skylake new intel cpu is next year.
 
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Well I tried Mafia 2 which I found to be CPU bound a couple of years back when I did a review of the 1155 Celeron G530. I think that was the model number. FPS were floating around the mid 30s, so it definitely suffered from the Pentium over a more threaded CPU.

When I reviewed the Celeron I put it up against my I7 950 which was much better.

Any way, that's one downer so far. I'm just installing GRID 2 so I will post back with my findings.

I too would not suggest going with an expensive board. There's a few H81 models that can overclock and their VRMs should allow 4.2ghz which is fine.

GRID 2.



So you can add that to the "Doesn't really want any cores" list.
 
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almoststew1990 said:
I'm going second hand so I can get one of these and and a basic overclocking motherboard for £70. This seems like great value to me- are these chips, when overclocked, still great for gaming?
Click to expand...

Terrible CPU's for gaming, assuming you want to play the latest games that get released.

GTA5 for example, is unplayable with it.
 
I think it was the anandtech pentium review which benched it against the i3; the i3 won or tied in every game, even against the overclocked pentium.
 
Yep, i3 handily beats the overclocked pentium in most game reviews I've seen cheesyboy.

If second hand I'd certainly look for a 2500k or similar. If you really want to get the pentium don't waste money on a Z97 mobo, it doesn't need it.
 
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