A reminder of when clockspeed was king
Remember the good old 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 clockspeeds. Higher frequencies meant more performance and more money. Okay, you might have found the odd feature was fused off. But clockspeed was king. The fun bit involved buying a cheapskate model and then clocking the twangers off it. The result was often a high performance CPU for pennies. But not these days.
There are two reasons for that. For starters, 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 now 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 Intel Pentium К Anniversary 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 fancy-pants 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 Hyperthreading. You don't get a Turbo mode. It just runs at 3.2GHz. You have to make do with just 3MB of cache memory. But, 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.
In the case of our test chip, that turns out to bea verycreditable 4.6GHz. In otherwords, it'll run at roughly the same clockspeed as the much more expensive Intel chips here. But, because it normally runs at a modest clockspeed, 4.6GHz means an epic 1.4GHz overclock. And all for £50. Impressive, as they used to say in Quake III, 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 clockspeed is a little patchy. The budget gaming thing looks particularly dicey when you see it delivering slightly under half the frame rate of a quad-core Core i5-4690K. Scary.
Moreover, even that huge 1.4GHz overclock only represents a 40-something per cent overclock where you’d need a full 100 per cent 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 multi-core age of computing that was predicted a decade ago. But a desktop PC with just two cores and no per-core multi-threading is still seriously old hat. 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 with a view to future upgrades, then it makes sense. It's not a giant killer in the traditional sense. But that's because those days are almost certainly gone.
Dirt cheap; sports Intel’s Haswell cores overclocks like a trooper.
SPECIFICATIONS
CPU cores/threads 2/2
Process technology 22nm
Clockspeed 3.2GHz
CPU architecture Haswell
Socket LGA1150