Reviews - Intel Pentium G3220 (22nm Haswell)

[HEXUS]

It's all about the Pentiums, maybe?

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[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Read more.

[wasabi]

Good review - thanks. Nice to see a review looking at the affordable end of the market and looking at it in combination with discreet graphics.

[marshalex]

One of these, a mini-itx mobo, memory, case and graphics card and you've got the making of an alright htpc!

[lopes390]

not bad for the price and the thing is its probably as good as my q6600 go. remember those

[Myss_tree]

Have one of these in my backup desktop. Along with a HD7770 and a 256GB samsung SSD its surprisingly nimble. It actually boots to desktop quicker than my Ivybridge i7 3770 though thats probably because its a newer machine and with less stuff on it.
Its only got 4GB memory (2 slots, 2 x 2GB) and i have been thinking of increasing it to 8Gb (2 x 4GB). I dont game or am i likely to do anything to intensive with it. The tests here seem to suggest that for general use there is no real benefit to doubling the ram or at least not £50 worth of benefit (approx cost of 2 x 4GB sticks)

[Myss_tree]

An interesting addition to this test would have been this http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00J0P042U/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_4?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A1RBLI8BU7UB9Y ... the Celeron J1900, particularly with the Athlon 5350 included in the above test.

[llololloy]

Thanks for the article, probably more useful to the majority of users than the usual bleeding edge stuff.
CPUs today (and realistically the last 10 years) are powerful enough to run office applications and browsing with ease, which is what most PCs are used for. What percentage of PC users actually render or encode?
Big fan of low cost CPUs here.

[WrATHZer0]

Why does Hexus put such a positive spin on Intel CPUs? The FSB of 1333 yet an A10 has 2133 plus superior gaming performance without the need for a dedicated card. My goodness, only high end Intel supports memory over 1666 and none of them are unlocked for their price, you pay a premium for that on Intel CPUs. Yes Intel perform much better on singlethread, which is sad really because we should be a lot more multithreaded now days.

[bluevaping]

Thanks for the article, probably more useful to the majority of users than the usual bleeding edge stuff.
CPUs today (and realistically the last 10 years) are powerful enough to run office applications and browsing with ease, which is what most PCs are used for. What percentage of PC users actually render or encode?
Big fan of low cost CPUs here.

The performance numbers speak for themselves. You spend about 500% more on top of the line i7 for 5% gain on average games. If you render or encode daily or weekly you have a case to step up. The pentium can still render or encode just not as fast. If you casual game two or three times a week and render or encode once month who cares. If you game more than that you might want to go i5. Because you could use the 2 other cores lightly to help with multiplayer, online or more demanding tasks.

I wish they had a budget Quad Core Pentium clocked around 2.8 with probably less L2 cache with basic graphics for about $130.

[Myss_tree]

The performance numbers speak for themselves. You spend about 500% more on top of the line i7 for 5% gain on average games.

Known as the 'law of diminishing returns.'
xxxx may cost 10 times more than yyyy and be better just not ten times better. Of course a lot of folk are prepared to pay a lot more for an advantage, exclusivety, performance, etc.
The article as well is a good example of the 'Cock Syndrome' that generally pervades Tech sites where the 'bigger, faster, more powerful, better' takes precedence over the 99% mainstream stuff.

[Myss_tree]

The G3220 as well is far better value than its bigger brother G3430 (about £28 price difference at Scan) with near identical performance especially single threaded.
The G3430 as well is only a tenner less then i3 entry level which kind of suggests that whatever CPU you are looking at buying go for the cheapest which would usually be the entry level in the range if you are after value for money.

[Ron-ski]

I recognised the value in these processors last November, I built 5 new PC's for office work and by dropping from an i3 to Pentium I could squeeze in a 180GB Intel SSD instead of a 120GB drive. For £367+VAT I had a tower unit with W7 Professional, 4GB ram, 180GB SSD, DVD RW and I also squeezed a silent cooler into it as well. What really surprised me was that it could calculate PI to 1 million places almost as quick as my i5 750 which is clocked a 4Ghz. The machine is a pleasure to use at work each day, it's so quick.

[pastymuncher]

These are decent cheap cpu's. I built a complete pc (new everything including a Silverstone psu, half decent cooler, 60GB SSD, 1TB HDD, Case, Card reader, 2x 2GB sticks of Gskill ram and Windows 7 64bit) for just under £300 using a Pentium 3220 and Asrock H81 HDS motherboard for the sister in law. It replaced her old AM2 setup and she is chuffed to bits with it. I just built a new pc for the wife using a 3420 and she is also chuffed to bits with it. They have decent performance and the onboard graphics is plenty enough for a general purpose/facebook gaming pc. They also use very little power and run very cool. I paid £36 for the 3220 and £42 for the 3420 (both were on offer at the time. For the price they are unbeatable.

[RAJA666]

If I am using Photoshop, SketchIT and simple editing home video; what is the difference it term of performance if I go for Pentium+750 Ti compare to i7+750 Ti? Does the gaming comparison result above still apply to this?
note: I understand if I use AutoCAD etc I may be better to go with workstation graphic adapter, but for Photoshop/SketchIt/Simple Video Editing I will appreciate if people can comment. Thanks firstly.

[Greatkingrat]

This is certainly an excellent review for anyone building a budget system, but why would a serious gamer fork out for a top of the range i7 and 16GB of RAM, to then match it up with GTX750Ti?
It's a capable card for the money but I suspect that it was pretty much performing at 100% with the G3220 and therefore somewhat bottlenecked the more powerful system.
Games are becoming more memory dependant and a system with just 4GB and a dual-core processor might soon be insufficient for them at ultra settings.
It's a pity that this review didn't include a higher level graphics card to see just how far you could go before the G3220 became the limiting factor and the i7 started to surge ahead.
Something like a GTX Titan might jog along with the Pentium but would really be able to stretch its legs and sprint off into the distance with an i7.

The point is, that if the GTX750Ti is about as far as you can go, then a casual gamer would have to upgrade both his graphics card and processor (and possibly RAM too) as he becomes more serious and demanding of his hobby.

My son is into gaming and video encoding and originally had a Core2Duo system, upgraded to Core2Quad and now i7 3770K.
His current graphics card is an AMD HD6850 and he found that gaming performance was about the same as with his old HD4870 until he moved up to the i7.
The Quad gave a relatively small but noticeable improvement in encoding (essentially being two Duos on one chip) but the i7 increased performance massively. The move from 4GB DDR2 to 8GB DDR3 no doubt helped too.