We briefly looked at the Intel Pentium G3258, AKA Pentium Anniversary Edition, in the Intel Core i7-4790K 'Devil's Canyon' review earlier in the week. Tarinder even referred to this processor as "our favourite new chip". But what motherboard would you use to make the most of this enthusiast on a budget part? ASRock thinks it has a couple of solutions which are perfect for you and your new Pentium Anniversary chip.
ASRock has supplemented its already wide range of Intel 9 Series motherboards with its Anniversary Series. Buyers can choose from a full sized ATX Z97 Anniversary or the micro-ATX Z97M Anniversary. Both boards are based upon the 'overclocking friendly' Intel Z97 Express chipset with a 5-phase VRM capable of pushing the limits of the Anniversary Pentium processor.
As you can (just about) see from the shot of the motherboard display info card, below (from Hardware.info), the ATX Anniversary board has the following features:
- Supports 5th Gen Intel Core i7, i5, i3, Pentium and Celeron procesors as well as 4th gen parts
- Four DDR3 3100 memory slots
- PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot, three PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slots and two PCI slots
- Six SATA 6 Gb/s ports, six USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI connection
- Audio: 7.1-channel Realtek ALC887
- Intel Gigabit LAN
- Exclusive ASRock features and utilities
TechPowerUp pegs the price of either of the Anniversary boards at under US$100 and Hardware.info concurs suggesting a price of € 70 - € 80 for the larger ATX version. These are expected to be some of the cheapest Z97 Express motherboards and as suggested in the intro, perhaps a good fit for a system based upon an Intel Pentium G3258 processor. The Anniversary Pentium G3258 is expected to arrive in retailers (priced around £54) at the end of this month.
