Determination: Core Efficiency Beats Cadre Count

Having watched the Pentium G3258 and Athlon X4 860K merchandise blows in no less than 20 games using two mid-range GPUs, the G3258 is undeniably faster and it'south the processor you want if yous're building our Budget Box with the intentions of gaming.

This might surprise a few of you given that the Athlon X4 860K is a quad-cadre chip clocked up to iv.0GHz, while the Pentium G3258 is a lowly dual-core that runs at iii.2GHz out of the box.

The problem for AMD, which nosotros accept seen time and time once again, is core efficiency. Having more cores bachelor isn't much use if they are slower. Moreover, just because a game can employ 4 cores (and all the games we tested could) doesn't mean a dual-core will be junior if two cores are working harder than four.

Most of the games saw the Athlon X4 860K working all four cores at 70% capacity or greater, with a few such as Culture: Beyond Earth, Thief, Battlefield Hardline and Battlefield 4 reaching xc%. Despite that, in all of those games the Pentium G3258 was equally fast or faster than the Athlon X4 860K.

Focusing on the overclocked iv.4GHz results we found that on boilerplate the Pentium G3258 was xv% faster than the Athlon X4 860K when paired with the Radeon R9 285 and xiv% faster with the GeForce GTX 960.

If we remove Assassin's Creed Unity results, which saw the Athlon X4 860K evangelize abnormally low results, the G3258 was still 13% faster with the R9 285 and nine% faster with the GTX 960.

Looking at the GTX 960 data, as this seems to be best case for the Athlon X4 860K (with the Assassin's Creed Unity results removed), nosotros find on average 4fps favoring the Pentium G3258. That's not a huge amount, merely every last frame counts in games such as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Total State of war Attila, Dying Light, Arma 3, Metro Redux and Crysis iii for example where the boilerplate frame rate was 40fps or lower.

For a lot of the games, such every bit Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs, Battlefield Hardline, Watch_Dogs, Hitman: Absolution and Dragon Historic period: Inquisition, performance was so shut it really didn't matter, so y'all could happily go either way. Sadly though, the Athlon just doesn't evangelize the aforementioned consistency as the Pentium G3258, beingness much slower at times.

At this betoken you may have noticed we decided to skip the power consumption testing. We didn't encounter the need to dredge upward those results for this type of commodity, we all know Intel is much more than efficient here based on results from previous articles.

Finally, aside from performance, the Pentium G3258 and its LGA1150 platform offers another advantages over the FM2+ Athlon X4 860K. Upgradability is a cardinal feature here, as gamers have the option to drop in a Core i3, i5 or even i7 processor down the track.

Touching on that a niggling more, the Core i3 isn't really an ideal upgrade. Although it does back up four threads thanks to Hyper-Threading, the highest clocked model runs at merely 3.8GHz with no Turbo boost, so it won't be much of an upgrade from an overclocked G3258, if at all.

The Core i7 makes little sense for gaming if you intendance nearly value so this leaves the Core i5 range and for LGA1150 users there are plenty of options, from the $185 Core i5-4430 to the $240 fully unlocked Core i5-4690K.