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Review: Intel Pentium G3220 (22nm Haswell)

by Parm Mann on 17 April 2014, 15:30

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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Benchmarks: Gaming

As expected, the entry-level IGP included in the Pentium G3220 struggles to play modern games, even at a basic 720p resolution.

Making use of dual-channel memory sees, on average, IGP performance increase by 12.6 per cent. Handy to know, though that's not quite enough to deliver smooth 720p gameplay.

Total War: Rome II tells us more of the same. Intel HD Graphics will suffice for multimedia usage, but for serious gaming you're going to want to consider a discrete graphics card.

But what sort of performance can you expect in such a scenario? To find out, we paired the Pentium G3220 with a mid-range Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 Ti WindForce graphics card that is readily available for around Ā£110. To make things interesting, we've tested using the latest available Nvidia drivers (337.50 beta) with varying amounts of system RAM - 4GB (single-channel), 8GB (dual-channel) and 16GB (dual-channel). Putting another permutation into the mix, we're also comparing GTX 750 Ti performance with our high-end graphics test bench, powered by a vastly more potent Core i7-4770K.

1080p Graphics Performance - Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti WindForce

  Image Preset
Intel Pentium G3220 (4GB)
Intel Pentium G3220 (8GB)
Intel Pentium G3220 (16GB)
Intel Core i7-4770K (16GB)
3DMark (score) Fire Strike
3,616
3,611
3,624
4,122
BioShock Infinite (avg fps) Maximum Quality
47.9
47.8
47.9
48.3
GRID 2 (avg fps) 4xMSAA, Ultra Quality
51.2
51.3
51.2
53.9
Total War: Rome II (avg fps) Very High Quality
46.7
47.0
46.9
52.8

Now that's interesting. When the onus is put on a discrete graphics card such as the GTX 750 Ti, our chosen games show very little benefit in running either more RAM or a much faster processor. We'd be more than happy to game at 1080p on a Pentium G3220 build with just 4GB of system memory and a mainstream discrete graphics card.