Which one is better performance-wise? My friend is trying to convince me that the Pentium build will be faster for gaming than an i3, but I wholeheartedly disagreed with him and built the i3-6100 build. The Pentium build appears to be more expensive because of price fluctuations but some tweaking could make the price fall.
So what are your thoughts on these two builds solely in the performance AND upgradability department? I want to settle this argument once and for all.
Go with the i3 its basically having 4 cores on a cpu but two of them are crap but are handy for games that require a 4 core cpu though. Your friend is an idiot by saying that the Pentium is faster than the i3.
Thanks for the quick feedback. I've been trying to tell him that but he just doesn't buy it! He claims he can just overclock the Pentium to outperform the i3...
in single threads, maybe. But by insignificant margins at best.
i3 is your best bet. My brother has that exact processor and it is INSANELY fast for what it needs to do. Bro is very happy with it. Machine boots more quickly than mine, even though he is using a Crucial M4. nothing but love for the Skylake i3s.
In single threads the i3 already outperforms my i5-6500 because of the higher clock speeds, which is awesome. Can't go wrong with any Intel these days it seems (at least in terms of core performance)!
i would say the i3 because you aren't screwed by games hard coded for 4 cores, and the actual difference between an OC g3258 and the i3 will be minimal at best in games
edit: i have the earlier gen 6100 ala a 4170, and i've been super happy with how well it performs with my r9 290
The G3258 was released as a $70 overclocking toy for enthusiasts. For a grandma PC that needs a bit of kick, it's great, and for games that only need one or two uber-fast cores it's excellent, but for anything more than that, you want the i3.
If you're going to overclock it pentium hands down, otherwise i3 if overclocking isnt your thing... A stock speed pentium is meh.
Thanks for the feedback guys! Finally got some opinions to back up my own... he already ordered the i3 so I will get back to you guys on how it performs!
EVen if you kicked it up to 4.5 GHZ, which you can do with a 3258, a phenom X4 would do better.
Which Phenom are you talking about? In any case, it doesn't really matter, because none of the Phenom II X4 skus will outperform a G3258. Let's say you can pull off 4.2GHz on a Phenom II X4 975, which should be doable with a good cooler, motherboard and PSU. Taking the G3258 to 4.2 or even 4.5, as you said, is doable.
I just can't recommend a Phenom. At this price, you want to get a FX-6300 or FX-8320. They're great chips and will perform significantly better than either a Phenom or a G3258 and have some crazy overclocking potential. I've seen 8.7GHz with the 8350, which is more than anyone needs.
I have the Pentium in a secondary rig, mine overclocked to 4.8ghz without issue. Provided you are not talking about a game which won't work with a dual core due to arbitrary bull, or it's a well multi-threaded game, it will run circles around the i3 due to the much higher single threaded performance.
While both sockets have perfectly suited upgrade paths, I'd personally take the i3 Skylake build. Yes, overclocking won't be happening on that board, but most AAA games coming out these days tend to be GPU bound anyway. Though they tend to be better at leveraging extra threads, which the G3258 is lacking in compared to the i3. The i3 at 3.7Ghz stock is incredible as it is, so the Pentium would need a mild OC just to match it.
Which was a competition score you realize. You can't pull that off with a normal cooler thats PPC G5 levels of heat.
The core i3 will of course be a better buy.
Not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of upgradability.
You could easaly upgrade to a i5-6500 + a more higherend gpu in the near future.
With the Haswell pentiumG you are pretty much stuck to a EOL dead platform.
There is realy no reason why you should go with the pentiumG in my opinnion.
Both cpu´s are basicly dual cores, but the core i3 atleast has hyper threading.
Which can be usefull in some scenario´s.
I know, I was just trying to make an example of the potential of the chip.
That's just an example. On a custom loop (just a waterblock, no peltier or anything) I've had a FX-8320 stableish at 5.6GHz. My point here is that the FX series chips represent significant progress by AMD and while some people can get away with a Phenom, If you can dole out the money, it's probably better to upgrade to an FX chip.
I love how so many years later, many people still don't know what hyper-threading actually is...
i3 is having 4 cores basically in another universe. It's funny how it doesn't support 4 simultaneous threads either, but nobody cares for false advertising.
Hyperthreading is just better usage management. It does not have extra cores or whatever, it just have better usage management, so the cores doesn't stay inactive while the other parts of the CPU finish their assignments...
I agree with that. When this system can't handle it anymore I'll get an 8370 then after that AM4
Depending on when that happens, you may be best off picking up an AM4 system. Especially if hold out on it until mid 2017. I'm sure you'll see some decent used AM4 stuff show up on the market.
@psycho_666 Thank you. I hate it when people are like "oh I've got 8 cores on my 3770k because windows said so. See task manager???!?!?! It beats the 8350 because the 8350 shares cache." I've had that argument before, people are educated enough to understand the implications of sharing cache, but when someone says hyperthreading they seem to think it's a CPU that utilizes Quantum Entanglement to access a supercomputer in an alternate universe to process instructions sent to the chip in your system. For people who are discussing the performance of logic gates, there isn't a whole lot of logic involved.
