This article was published in the November 2014 issue of Maximum PC. For more trusted reviews and feature stories, subscribe here.
Intel’s new Pentium K CPU comes with both a bargain price and bargain specs—so we put it to the test in a budget gaming system
Length of Time: 2-4 Hours | Difficulty: Medium
The Mission
As our monthly blueprint roundup demonstrates, putting together a budget gaming system for under $800 is very doable. It just comes with trade-offs—one of which is giving up on CPU overclocking. Unlocked Intel Core i5 chips start at $100 more than the AMD FX-6300 part in our budget Blueprint build, and in a rig where even going up or down by $20 becomes noticeable, that extra cost is beyond justifi cation.
But this summer, Intel released the Pentium G3258—or as we like to call it, the Pentium K. At $70, this unlocked 3.2GHz dual-core Haswell chip looks pretty attractive on paper. It undercuts the AMD FX-6300 by $40 and the cheapest Core i3 CPU by about $50, making it economically feasible as an alternative CPU… so long as the ability to overclock gives it a big enough boost to shore up its budget architecture. There’s only one way to find out if it’s worth it in order to chase the dream of overclocking in a budget build, so we put together a rig with the Pentium K as the star of the show.
Cleaning Up Nice
As this is a budget system, we weren’t ultra-picky in parts selection. We made some compromises, such the case, deciding to show last issue’s Enermax Coenus some love. Despite its seemingly Transformers-themed appearance, the Coenus is spacious and has a thoughtful layout that accommodates many random part swaps. It also looks much more attractive than a cutthroat-cheap Rosewill case. Likewise, we stuck with modest but reliable parts for our RAM and PSU: two sticks of 4GB Corsair Value RAM to run in dual-channel mode, and the Corsair CX500 to take advantage of its 80-Plus Bronze rating, ample cables, and three-year warranty.
We spent a little more on parts that future-proofed us (the Z97 mobo), affected overclocking (the H60 CLC CPU cooler), or improved our gaming experience (the larger-than-bare-minimum SSD). We felt our spending was warranted, given we wanted to push our Pentium K as high as it could go and also go for better gaming.
The only part we struggled with was the GPU. Our rig could handle a beefy and elaborate setup, but we chose to spend conservatively, which resulted in ignoring our mobo’s Crossfi re-only compatibility and going with a GeForce GTX 750 Ti card from EVGA.
1. Decisions, Decisions
Part of the reason we chose the Coenus for our case (besides its cost) was the flexibility it gave us in determining the order of our build. For example, since the optical drive installs from the front, you can do that at any time. And pulling off the panel behind the motherboard gives access to cutouts, allowing you to install the CPU cooler’s backplate after you mount the motherboard to the case, or install your hard drives at your leisure. We chose to install our motherboard first, and then followed with attaching the CPU’s backplate to the board. We put in the processor next, taking care (as always) to drop it straight down into the socket while matching up the notches correctly.
2. Cool Running
We first tried installing the H60’s fan and radiator at the top of the case, but changed tack due to the motherboard’s awkward position relative to the top of the case and the length of the H60’s tubes. Instead, we swapped them in for the Coenus’s rear fan—a fiddly operation. We managed it by fi rst holding the fan in place, then threading a screw through the fan’s two top-right holes and lining up the radiator’s corresponding hole with the tip of the screw, before beginning to screw the pieces together. (Note: Orient the tubes toward the bottom of the case to give you more room later.) We then repeated this process with the hole diagonal from the first screw, working in an “X” pattern, and by attaching the pump.
3. Gutsy Moves
To make the installation of our CPU cooler easier, we waited to install our RAM until after we’d secured the cooler’s pump. The thought behind what type of RAM we used was a little less studied—given the dependability of Corsair’s value line, we grabbed two DIMMs of 4GB and popped them in. Settling on an EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti card, however, required more debate. We considered future-proofing by selecting a Radeon card, since this Biostar mobo supports only Crossfire dual-GPU configurations. But we settled on E VGA’s 750 Ti, since in the real world few people use dual-card configurations at this price range, but well over half of gamers (on Steam, at least) prefer Nvidia. We inserted the video card now, so that after putting in the PSU we could hook up all the connectors at the same time.
4. Shutting Up and Driving
As we wanted to plug in all of the power connectors at once, the optical, solid-state, and hard-disk drives went in next. Our Samsung SH-224 is a standard DVD/CD burner and nothing fancy; neither is our Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD (the latter is for documents and media storage). By contrast, our OCZ Vertex 460 240GB SSD is almost double what we recommend for our Blueprint budget gaming build. As we noted earlier, the Vertex was a conscious splurge in order to get faster performance and more space to hold games, but it could be pared back to a 128GB SSD if you want to save $40–$50. The CX500 that feeds our budget rig doesn’t take much space (the Coenus will easily hold larger), so popping it in was easy. If you’re strapped for cash, opt for the CX430—but note it could limit your choice of future video cards.
5. Preparing for Takeoff
After installing Windows 8.1, we first configured and ran all of our benchmarks under stock settings to set up a baseline for our comparison between the Pentium K’s stock and overclocked performance. Then we prepared for our overclocking efforts by downloading CPU-Z and CPUID from http://ift.tt/1bI7mv5, as well as Prime95 from http://ift.tt/1IeUlOX and then installing all three tools. If you haven’t used these programs before, CPU-Z provides clock information; CPUID lists the core temperatures; and Prime95 serves as the stress test for determining the stability of an overclock. Biostar also provides a Windows-based utility for overclocking, but we didn’t have much luck with it. Even when installing the most recent version of the utility from the Biostar website, loading the utility caused our system to spontaneously reboot. Instead, we decided to stick to Biostar’s esoteric but functional UEFI-BIOS interface for our overclocking tweaks.
6. Absolute Power
To overclock the Pentium K, we worked in the “O.N.E.” UEFI-BIOS submenu, found by clicking on the second-from-right icon at the bottom of the main BIOS screen. Increasing the amount of juice fed to the CPU had to be done via the “Voltages Configuration” option. First, we changed the “CPU Voltage Mode” to “Override,” then we changed the “CPU Override Voltage Target” to 1.3V as our starting point (the CPU was automatically drawing just a little over 1.0V at stock speed). All the clock changes had to be tweaked via the “CPU Configuration” option. The first step was to switch the “CPU Ratio Mode” to “ALL cores,” then we could up the clock speed via “CPU Ratio.” We began with an overclocked speed of 4.0GHz and eventually got it to a stable 4.7GHz.
So, How Special Is the Pentium K?
As the first overclockable Pentium CPU, the G3258 doesn’t disappoint. We built this rig to see how much power we could squeeze from this low-end chip, and the answer is quite a bit—after overclocking the Pentium K, we saw a sizable jump in performance in CPU-heavy tasks. It also beat CPUs with more cores. Not bad for $70.
Overclocking went butter-smooth, too. Our initial leap from 3.2GHz to 4.0GHz showed such a moderate jump in temperature that we went to 4.2GHz after just 15 minutes of stress testing. The K’s temperatures held steady in the high 60s/low 70s in the 4.4GHz–4.6GHz range, and it wasn’t until we tried to hit 4.8GHz that our system protested. Increasing the juice to 1.35V and then 1.4V didn’t change our near-instant BSODs at 4.8GHz, and it wasn’t until we stepped it down to 4.7GHz and dialed the voltage back to 1.3V that our rig happily chugged along in the low 70s. All in all, overclocking took us 10 minutes of troubleshooting; the bulk of our five hours spent on the task was letting Prime95 do its work. Our H60 defi nitely earned its keep.
The Pentium K also held up well. Our budget choice of video card impacted the benchmark results more than our choice of CPU. When we switched to a Radeon R9 280X, we saw notable improvement in two of our benchmarks. Tomb Raider shot up to 65.7fps, while Metro: Last Light rose to 56fps. Oddly, Hitman: Absolution dropped to 40fps, but our guess is that has something to do with the game not being well optimized for AMD graphics cards. Of course, benchmarks don’t guarantee equal performance throughout games, but a K build should be a palatable budget gaming system. If you want to save cash for a better GPU, hunt for mail-in rebate deals on parts. We saw some available but excluded them from our price list. Had we done so, we’d have cut $50–$70 from the total price.
From maximumpc
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