Overclocking madness!
It appears Intel has thrown the custom gaming builder community into disarray with the release of its 20th Anniversary edition of the G3258 Dual core Pentium processor. The new processor heralds Intel's first unlocked multiplier on a dual core processor in quite some time. With reports of stable oveclocks up to 4.8Ghz in some cases, the G3258 is full of promise for such an affordable CPU at around $100 (at time of printing). This pint sized, comparative runt of the litter seems to hold up well against many of it's shinier and far more expensive siblings when struck with lightning and overcharged to such speedy heights. While initially it appeared that the processor would only be overclockable with the Z-series chipsets, forums the world over have been littered with reports of Gigabyte, Asus and Asrock H and even B series chipsets now supporting 'non-Z' multiplier adjustments. What does this mean for the gaming community? Well FPS numbers seem to vary wildy between games depending on whether they are multithreaded CPU crushers or more GPU dependent. Either way, the G3258 is touted to be the best pound for pound performer your hard earned dollar can buy and as a result I'll likely be including in my next budget gaming build to see what it can deliver.
To check out some good gaming performance reviews of the G3258 go to Legit Reviews to check out their reasonably real world benchmarks.
