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Gta plays just fine for me with this. Get average of 40fps on high settings at 1080p. Not even overclocked. Very recommended

That's the opposite of my experience. GTA V was stuttering badly and the load on my GPU was tiny compared to the CPU. You'd be driving along and the scenery would just stop loading and you'd be driving along on a invisible road and then crash into an invisible object - and it's a well documented issue with playing GTA V on a dual core setup.

My GPU is only a R9 280 and it was definitely creating a bottleneck on such a 'low-end' card. Witcher 3 was pretty much unplayable too.

Also, by the time you've bought a really good watercooler to get this up to 4.8Ghz (which I did - H100i) you could've probably bought an i5.

Ended up buying a second hand 4670K from eBay and now things are great.

It's still a hot deal, however you need to manage your expectations of this budget chip.

Actually, I'm enjoying the comments here. Some good insight for me as I'm so out of touch with CPU specs these days ... I'm finding the comments helpful and not really seeing them as 'mine is better than yours' ... some good input from both sides from what I see.

You forgot to add £3.58 for the cheapest delivery charge.

A Passmark CPU benchmark of 3998. Pretty decent for £40

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+G3258+%40+3.20GHz

Great general use chip, especially when overclocked, and depending on your motherboard choice you can put a small overclock on it using even the supplied cooler. At first it was a popular choice with budget-build gamers but then as reviewers, forum users, Tom's quarterly build challenges, gamers on Youtubers etc, started to report, for smooth game play with some games, though, if your main use for the computer is to be gaming, ideally shell out a bit more for an i3 with hyperthreading, which on top of having two physical cores has four threads. Definitely a hot at the price, though!

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Gta plays just fine for me with this. Get average of 40fps on high settings at 1080p. Not even overclocked. Very recommended

I think it's going to get hot in here. Great find and by far the best chip available for this price (from what I have seen, about to buy and find out for myself)

That's the opposite of my experience. GTA V was stuttering badly and the load on my GPU was tiny compared to the CPU. You'd be driving along and the scenery would just stop loading and you'd be driving along on a invisible road and then crash into an invisible object - and it's a well documented issue with playing GTA V on a dual core setup.

My GPU is only a R9 280 and it was definitely creating a bottleneck on such a 'low-end' card. Witcher 3 was pretty much unplayable too.

Also, by the time you've bought a really good watercooler to get this up to 4.8Ghz (which I did - H100i) you could've probably bought an i5.

Ended up buying a second hand 4670K from eBay and now things are great.

It's still a hot deal, however you need to manage your expectations of this budget chip.

There is a well known problem with amd cards and dual core cpus eurogamer went into depth about it do not combine this with a amd card was the outcome.

Sounds like you may have another problem? Whats the memory?

Nice price.

I've got a very old Dell Inspiron 530 desktop from about 2007 with an LGA775 mb thats still going strong. Just got an old E8600 cpu for it to replace the stock E4300, so looking forward to installing that this evening.

It really is amazing what a few small upgrades can do to an old pc to speed it up (SSD, more/faster ram....etc). I'd also recommend once in a while reinstalling Windows, as lets face it, over time it starts to slow down your machine.

Not really, since the 4670k fixed it. I have enough RAM thanks and as for the speed, well I'll leave this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWgzA2C61z4

Unfortunately, hindsight is 20/20.

If you would have bought a 970 or 980 with the money you spent on the CPU+Waterblcok, you'd have far better performance.

If you originally bought a 980ti, you'd have spent around the same money as you ended up spending.

100i is about 100 quid, 175 for the 280, 175 for the 4760k... That's 450!

Not in my case, since the R9 280 was a gift. I got the 4760k for £120 delivered.

Probably the most underrated and unnoticed CPU.

I have this cpu over clocked at 4.3ghz since virtually day one and it has never given me a problem. In single threaded modes it is as fast as any i7, its downfall is obviously multi threaded tasks and that is where it starts running into problems with gaming especially when coupled with some AMD cards just as Eurogame found.
However at £38 you really can't go wrong if you have an LGA1150 board with a lower spec cpu in it.
Be aware though that Win 10 will not allow you to overclock this CPU, or at least wouldn't, without removing/ renaming an intel specific file C:\Windows\System32\mcupdate_GenuineIntel.dll, once done you can overclock to your hearts content

What CPU did you get?

I bought an i5-3570k for £45, i'll stick with that for now

I disagree, the internet was creaming itself about it last year.

Anyone who looks out for new tech will have noticed, apart from that a lot of people look at its price compared to i5s etc and then think the worst.

X5660, it should put a bit of life back into my x58 based machine - I'm moving from an i7 920.

Can only get 3.7Ghz on mine with a Gigabyte MX5.

Got this last year paired with a 750ti. Not found a game yet I can't comfortably play at 1080. Never experienced any stutter issues that those with and cards have experienced. Mines on a cheap £30 as rock h81 motherboard and overclocks like a champ with a noctua cooler, no need for expensive water cooling and delidding unless you need a couple of extra hundred MHz.

Needs a 6th gen version with hyperthreading selling for £60. Would probably kill off amd though.

Which cpu?

gta5 works fine for me. I have it at 4.3ghz and it rarely breaks 70 degrees

I wouldn't really call the X5660 an upgrade over an i7-920. Same generation, just a couple of extra cores. I use a dual X5660 as a testbed, and there are some things that perform much better even on the G3258

Thanks OP needed three of these for some z97n wifi mobos I recently picked up and had been looking around for best price.

Used one before and they pretty much all run at 4ghz on stock....never felt the need to take them higher then that.

http://ark.intel.com/products/47921/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X5660-12M-Cache-2_80-GHz-6_40-GTs-Intel-QPI

http://ark.intel.com/products/82723/Intel-Pentium-Processor-G3258-3M-Cache-3_20-GHz

What specific functionality does the G3258 have that makes it run somethings better?

Single thread performance
It's worth mentioning that this was tested with Excel (building a pivot table from a 800mb csv) and the second test was a macro running specific commands. With the latter, the dual X5660 took over two hours, where a G3220 took just over 75 minutes

My experience with this CPU is that it's not the Celeron 300A I was looking for. Of course that was a whole different situation, then the price difference between the 300A and the P2 450 was massive, it was a low end part matching one of the highest end parts for performance. This CPU is just a dual core that can run up a big clock speed. It has limited usage in reality in terms of overclocking.

Thanks, so it's of limited use still in reality. For budget gaming it's OK. Single thread performance is really where it's best used. Of course many tasks require not only excellent single thread performance, but multiple single thread performance. It is what it is though, a dual core CPU with a capability of high clock speed thread performance.

I guess what I should say is that it's hard to moan at this price, but any hype about overclocking has to be put in to context, this CPU computes only 2 threads whatever the circumstances and the limitations thereof are apparent.

GTA 5 may work ok for some with this CPU but there are other popular games out there such as Witcher 3, Far Cry 3 and up coming games which could struggle unless you have a good GPU. Then again, if you have the money to buy a good GPU then you have the money to by an i5 or i7 and not use this for games.

Don't get me wrong, the X5660 is an excellent CPU for server purposes, especially running multiple VM's - but for desktop usage the lower clock speed will have an impact despite the extra 2 cores over a i7-920.
Just putting it out there as it isn't always worth upgrading an i7 with a Xeon :smiley:

This is good for HTPC

Geez...is this thread REALLY degenerating into a detailed argument on which CPU is better?

It's a great price for this chip......if you're not sure if it's the right processor for you buy it, try it and if it doesn't do the job you want sell it on E-Bay for £40 and get your money back........Sheeesh!

How would it run these programmes all running at the same time ?
4 tabs open in firefox
uttorent 24/7
sabznzb
winrar
vlc

Lots of info here about the G3258.. I had a couple of them, one struggled to get to 4.2GHz even at 1.3v core, the other was happy at 4.4 with only a slight voltage increase (budget watercooling)..ended up flogging them and getting a 4690k..no regrets tho.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1500524/intel-pentium-g3258-performance-and-owners-club-now-with-gtx-970

Just be aware the G3258 is a PITA when it comes to installing windows 10. They are not compatible with the latest Microsoft microcode (which comes with Windows 10) out of the box. To install I had to disable overclocking and 1 core in the bios, install windows as normal, disable Microsoft microcode in windows, go back to the bios and enable 2 cores + overclocking again... which was fine I guess but it took quite a bit of head scratching to work out what was going on!

See:

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/3f3mro/discussion_psa_windows_10_currently_not/

So the XW6600 goes to quad core, but the Z620 takes up to six core E5s? That will get some work done!

Not quite the Z620 will take dual 10 cores, so 20 physical and 20 virtual so 40 threads.

Awesome find for price. I used one of these to build my home theatre streaming server (PLEX) and it's been absolutely fantastic- been able to transcode films to 4 devices simultaneously when testing (not been needed in real-world application yet though), so the CPU is adequate for this if anyone is interested to know.

I have one of these in my newish build. I couldn't afford all the new bits at once but knew this baby would hold me over til i did. Its a great chip at an excellent price. Even with it overclocked and with the best gpu its still going to struggle with the very newest games. I'll be grabbing an i5 k series in the near future though.

Great CPU, I used it with an Asus H81M-PLUS m/board as a media pc for main room using the m/b onboard hdmi. No issues with 1080p video and even play X-Com with the built in cpu graphics. From a gaming point of view I guess it depends on how much your gaming and your budget, but for mid-level gaming paired with a 750Ti I'm sure it would do a fine job.

This is so hot you need a watercooler.

I've got one of these OCed to 4.2 with the stock cooler. Whilst it's definitely the bottleneck on my system, it's probably the best bang for your buck cpu out there. If you want a cheap to mid system I wouldn't recommend anything else unless you want to fork out an extra hundred for an i5

Extra cores equate to an upgrade everytime.

I don't use it much for gaming, Sims 3 and Dragon Age (the original) are the only other games I've played on it, which played fine. Mainly use Kodi for 1080p video playback, video encoding, AVStoDVD for creating dvd's, plus the usual office, chrome etc. I also used to use it for blu-ray playback (you know those actual shinig disc shaped things) but I use my PS3 for that now. I still haven't messed about with overclocking, the idea was to do a new install make sure everything was running fine then overclock, but still on stock and everything runs fine.

I don't have a dedicated graphics card, when I was looking to get this cpu I would of had to spend £80-£100 on something like the 750Ti to see any improvement over the onboard graphics, which would be fine if I was gaming even on a semi-regular basis, but I wasn't so just stuck with the onboard graphics which are more than adequate for my needs :smile:

I had no problems installing windows 10 with this

Thanks have ordered just need advice on a cheap mini itx board up to £60

Yeah I was lucky as I was able to use my old base unit (mid sized hidden away in a £18 Ikea storage box near the TV) so was able to get a regular sized motherboard to go with the cpu.

Use with cheap board until 1150 socket chips are so cheap people flog them for £40 on ebay. Started with an E1500 then 3 years later picked up a cheap Q8200 for £40. Still works fine. Going to upgrade to this + cheap board until the i5s are £40 on ebay :smiley:

Have one of these in my MicroServer. Brilliant little processor! Easily handles multiple VM's

I've not had any issues with it, although not tried overclocking on it yet. Only has 2 memory slots and 1 full size PCI slot for graphics card, but that was never an issue for my use. Not sure if the picture on the pcworld website is the same model, but the description seems to be for the H81-plus

Amazing value, but I'm equally amazed that OP is watercooling one of these when for the price of the Pentium plus the watercooler, he could have got a much more capable i3.

What a pile of old intel scrap,amd every time.Cold for me!

This is good little OC chip, but serious issue with Windows 10.

You need to disabled the 2nd core in the bios in order to run Windows 10. so it effectively becomes a single core processor. if you can actually get Windows 10 to boot with both cores it causes an infinite reset loop.

neither Intel or MS will accept liability for solving it.

Didn't know that.
But quick google gives this fix

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3g52o0/fix_for_installing_windows_10_on_an_intel_g3258/

I have also read that, but the reality is that fix doesn't work for everyone, and there is no feedback anywhere about the chips ability to OC in windows after the fix.

I am just making people aware, personally id rather spend a little more on an Haswell i3.

The fix listed above works and.I have been running an overclock @ 4.2Ghz on both cores stable for months. For the price you really can't beat it!

I am running win 10 on this chip clocked at 4.8 with h55 and no problems of any kind reported

Amazon is correct, PCworld is not (what a surprise!!!). The picture at PCW is wrong as is the description, and they don't even match each other.

Good little board. I picked up a couple on the bay for £19.99 each without the shields. G3258 at 4GHz from the start, never really bothered with tuning.

Now OOS

I guess it's fun to tinker, but you can overclock this chip as much as you want - it's still going to stutter in games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxUPJdcChzE

Thanks for the info, I'll look out on the day for one. Unfortunately for me, I stopped in at Novatech today and walked away with a new i7 6gen something or other. I couldn't turn down the offer.. but it meant a new ddr4 mobo, memory etc. Not what I was after, so still want to have a go as this g3285 setup.

I have this chip OC'ed to 4.3ghz admittedly using a non stock cooler for quietness, however I had no issues installing windows 10 or enabling OCing

Anyone tried theres yet i notice its not listed on there site now

Yeah i agree with the AMD fact, plus Nvidia cards have been optimised to work play smoothly around GTA.

Expire as price is now £50

I cancelled mine as i am going for the new i3 6100 instead