Intel Pentium G3258 On Linux

Overall, the Pentium G3258 on this ASRock Z97 system had an overall system power consumption average of 55 Watts during a wide range of tests while it bottomed out at 33 Watts and peaked at 59 Watts. When overclocked to 4.4GHz, the G3258 had an average system power consumption of 67 Watts and a peak of 87 Watts.

I haven't had my hands on a Pentium processor in a while, but playing around with the Pentium G3258 this month has been interesting and brought back many memories. While the G3258 represents twenty years of the Pentium brand, I wouldn't recommend this $70 CPU to many Linux users.

If you're mostly bound to running simple single-threaded applications, aren't running any games or making extensive use of the HD Graphics, and do plan to overclock this CPU to get an extra ~40% clock speed, then the Intel Pentium G3258 is a decent offering for Linux users. Besides being a dual-core part without Hyper Threading, the other performance limitation with the Pentium line-up comes down to the lack of AVX that can benefit many computationally intensive Linux applications and the AES-NI support that makes things faster for those utilizing Linux disk encryption. However, if performance is important to you or this is a machine you'll be using full time outside of light desktop work, you're better off getting at least a Core i3 series CPU with greater performance potential and better HD Graphics. For those wondering how this Pentium G3258 stacks up against AMD APUs under Linux, I hope to have those numbers ready in the days to come.

Stay tuned for more Intel Pentium G3258 Linux benchmarks to come in the days and weeks ahead on Phoronix as we'll also use this system for some other kernel and compiler tests, etc. Those interested in the Pentium G3258 can find the anniversary processor for about $70 USD from major Internet retailers.

If you wish to see how your own Linux system compares to the Intel Pentium/Core processors tested in this article, it's easy to do so by installing the Phoronix Test Suite and simply running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1407161-KH-INTELPENT54. If you appreciate all of this Linux hardware testing done at Phoronix, join Phoronix Premium today!