Benchmarks: Core
Our PiFast benchmark remains a great tool for testing single-core speed, and the Pentium's positioning near the top of the chart is testament to the capability of Intel's Haswell architecture. This £40 CPU, running at 3GHz, will be very quick in single-threaded scenarios.
There is a small caveat to be aware of, though. Remember that the Pentium has just the two Haswell cores at its disposal, and with no Hyper Threading technology, performance isn't quite as hot in multi-threaded workloads. Interesting to note, also, that the use of dual-channel memory is showing barely any improvement in the single- and multi-core CPU benchmarks.
Nonetheless, on the CPU side of things, the Pentium G3220's two Haswell cores are able to outmuscle the four Jaguar cores available to AMD's Athlon 5350. Worth noting that the Athlon has a much lower TDP - and we'll take a look at power consumption later in the review - but from a performance perspective, the Pentium G3220 offers a surprising amount of punch for a £40-odd chip.
