INTEL PENTIUM K ANNIVERSARY G3258
A reminder of when clock speed was king
REMEMBER THE GOOD OL' DAYS when Intel, and AMD for that matter, really only made one CPU? Sure, you could still choose from a whole hill of processor models, from bargain basement to punitively overpriced, but underneath it all, it was just one chip from each outfit.
Back then, CPUs were all about clock speeds. Higher frequencies meant more performance and more money. OK, you might have found the odd feature was fused off. But clock speed was king. The fun bit involved buying a dirt-cheap model and clocking it to Hell and back. The result was often a high performance CPU for a pittance. But not these days.
There are two reasons for that. Firstly, variable core counts tend to spoil the fun. Intel, for instance, offers everything from dual-core right up to eight-core chips. In each case, that’s all you get. There are no hidden cores to be re-enabled. The other problem is that the whole overclocking thing has been locked down tighter than a drug baron in a supermax prison. All the old-school fun involving bus speeds and dividers is ancient history. Your only realistic option is via the CPU multiplier. And that’s only unlocked for a limited range of Intel processors.
It’s all pretty miserable compared to the swashbuckling, frequency-free-for-all days of yore. At least it was until Intel unexpectedly remembered it had a whole army of keen PC enthusiasts ready and waiting to celebrate a bit of low-budget fun.
Enter the G3258, a one-off special designed to recall those heady early days when you could overclock almost anything.
In this case, we’re dealing with a dual-core version of the same Haswell architecture found in every other Intel CPU here, including the super-flash six-core Core i7-5820K. So, it’s bang up-to-date in architectural terms.
But, it’s also conspicuously light on features. There’s no Hyper-Threading. You don’t get a Turbo mode. It just runs at 3.2GHz. You have to make do with 3MB of cache memory. However, as the "K" suggests, it is fully unlocked. So you can clock it as high as you dare, or at least as high as the silicon can cope with.
GIANT KILLER?
In the case of our test chip, that's a very creditable 4.6GHz. In other words, it’ll run at roughly the same clock speed as the much more expensive Intel chips here. But, because it normally runs at a modest clock speed, 4.6GHz means an epic 1.4GHz overclock. And all for $70. Impressive, as they used to say in QuakeIII, back when giant-killing CPUs were the norm.
That said, the huge overclock is just as well, because the G3258’s performance at its standard 3.2GHz clock speed is patchy. The budget gaming thing looks dicey when you see it delivering just under half the frame rate of a quad-core i5-4690K. Scary.
Moreover, even that huge 1.4GHz overclock only represents a 40-something percent overclock, while you’d need a full 100 percent to match the 4690K at stock clocks. So, yes. If you base a gaming rig on this special Anniversary chip, you’re going to suffer lower frame rates, even if you clock it to the absolute max.
Of course, at this price point, there’s only so much you can expect. The same goes for a CPU that supports just two software threads. We may not have entered the boldly multicore age of computing that was predicted a decade ago. But a desktop PC with just two cores and no per-core multithreading is still seriously old news. There’s a limit to what you can expect.
However, clocked beyond 4GHz, the G3258 is great value and lots of fun. If you’re on a budget or looking for a stopgap, then it makes sense. It’s not a giant killer in the traditional sense, but that’s because those days are almost certainly gone.