Intel Pentium G4400: Benchmarking A ~$60 Skylake Processor

Lastly are the reported CPU thermal results for the three tested Skylake CPUs. The Pentium G4400 with its reference heatsink led to an average temperature of 31.5C during benchmarking and peaked at 41C. The Core i5 6600K was cooler, but that's due to using a high-end, after-market Arctic Cooling heatsink due to that processor not shipping with a reference HSF. The Core i5 6500 with its stock heatsink was slightly warmer than the Pentium G4400.

If you have been curious how Intel Skylake performs on the low-end, now you know and hopefully found the Pentium G4400 results on Ubuntu Linux useful. The Pentium G4400 performance was just generally comparable to Core i5 530 and lower-end Core CPUs from the Sandy Bridge era, but again this is a CPU found at most retailers for under $70 USD. In some workloads, the Pentium G4400 Skylake jumped ahead though of even AMD's A10-7870K Godavari/Kaveri APU and other more expensive CPU/APUs.

For a price tag of under $70 USD, the Pentium G4400 is a decent LGA-1151 processor as shown by these results for light workloads or where performance isn't too important. With the Pentium G4400 it's possible to assemble a very affordable Skylake system; stay tuned for another article on building a cheap Intel Skylake Linux box. The reference heatsink also did a fine job cooling this 54 Watt (TDP) processor and the power efficiency results were compelling. The main poor point with the Pentium G4400 in my initial Linux benchmarks was the very slow OpenGL performance out of the processor's HD Graphics 510. It's also sad that Skylake Pentium CPUs don't have AVX support.

If you want to see how your own Linux system(s) compare to this Skylake Pentium processor in various CPU benchmarks, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1511277-HA-COMPARISO93.

If you are interested in the Intel Pentium G4400 you can find it in stock at Amazon.com.