Conclusion

Put it together with, say, a low-cost 8-series motherboard, 8GB of RAM and a mid-range graphics card such as the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, and you have the basis of a capable 1080p gaming rig for less than £250.

There's always interesting debate when the topic of entry-level PCs is broached in the office. Cheap PCs of yesteryear often provided a substandard experience when running everyday tasks such as high-definition video playback and basic multitasking.

But today's processors harness the latest technologies and are good enough to provide a reasonable experience for all but the power users, particularly when a discrete video card is thrown into the equation.

The £50 Intel Pentium Anniversary Edition G3258 is a case in point. Decent in out-of-the-box form and providing Core-like numbers when readily overclocked to 4GHz and beyond, there's little reason for many readers to spend more.

Put it together with, say, a low-cost 8-series motherboard, 8GB of RAM and a mid-range graphics card such as the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, and you have the basis of a capable 1080p gaming rig for less than £250. Heck, we couldn't tell the gaming difference between it and when swapping back out to the vastly dearer Core i7-4770K.

In the market for an inexpensive PC that can rival the latest-generation consoles for gaming and yet run everyday tasks with ease? The Intel Pentium Anniversary Edition G3258 is the processor we'd base it on. Recommended.

The Good

Great value for money
Acceptable everyday performance
Overclocks very well
Cheap supporting motherboards
Plays nicely with a discrete GPU

The Bad

Anaemic onboard graphics

HEXUS.awards

Intel Pentium Anniversary Edition G3258

HEXUS.where2buy

The Intel Pentium Anniversary Edition G3258 desktop CPU is available to purchase from Scan Computers.

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No Athlon X4 760k in the results? Disappoint, since that's actually the nearest genuine rival from a general purpose PC point of view (and also has an unlocked multi for ease of overclocking). I see no reason you'd run an overclocked Pentium Anniversary edition without a discrete GPU, which makes the 760k the perfect comparison.

But based on the other results, it looks like even a heavily overclocked Pentium would only just keep up with a stock 760k. It's a decent chip, sure, but I'd still rather have seen an unlocked i3 personally ;)

Amazed that a dual core chip does that well in gaming, shame on the devs for not implementing proper multithreading.

I saw scan did some BF4 benchmarks and the dual core pentium chip performand the same as a 4770k, Makes me wonder what the other 6 threads that get hammered when I play BF4 are actually doing.

Two possibilities:

One is a DX11 issue - it does a lot of rendering and drawing work in a single thread, which essentially bottlenecks the rest of the render. So you need a certain level of single thread performance to push a certain framerate.

The second, and far more likely scenario given the lack of performance increase from overclocking the Pentium, is that hexus' game settings are making the 750 Ti the bottleneck. Seriously, a 35% overclock garners a 1% - 3% frame rate increase? I'm sorry, but your bottleneck is in another component Mario ;) Just goes to show that your CPU doesn't matter that much if you're running your GPU on the ragged edge… which again makes me question the lack of the 760k in the benchmarks (or indeed a dual-core APU: an A6-6400k would've been interesting…)

Going to agree with scaryjim here. Those GTX750Ti results clearly indicate the GPU is the bottleneck, not the CPU in those particularly tests.

Firejack
Going to agree with scaryjim here. Those GTX750Ti results clearly indicate the GPU is the bottleneck, not the CPU in those particularly tests.

That may well be the point the Hexus team are trying to make, of course - if you want to game at 1080p on a £100 graphics card you don't need a £150 CPU, a £50 one will do just as well. But if that *is* the point, then it would've been nice to see the two closest competitors from AMD (the slightly cheaper A6-6400k and slightly more expensive Athlon x4 760k) tested with the same GPU, games, and settings, both at stock and overclocked (since both those AMD chips have unlocked multipliers). I understand time is limited for testing and writing reviews, but this one seems to raise more questions than it answers….!

Of course, if time is the issue I'll happily accept a shipment of suitable components to test them myself… :D