Intel Pentium G4600: A Surprising 3.6GHz Kabylake CPU For $90

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 31 January 2017 at 10:21 AM EST. Page 1 of 6. 33 Comments.

If you are looking to upgrade to a Kabylake processor but the Core i7 7700K at $350 and other higher-end models are too expensive, the Pentium G4600 is available at under $90 USD for a dual-core processor with Hyper Threading and clocks up to 3.6GHz.

The Pentium G4600 launched alongside the other LGA-1151 Kabylake processors earlier this month. This 3.6GHz Pentium processor has two cores plus Hyper Threading, 3MB Cache, DDR4-2400/2133 dual-channel support, Intel HD Graphics 630 up to 1.1GHz, and the processor has a TDP rating of 51 Watts. Overall, it's not that bad of a processor when it comes to specifications for a budget / lower-end PC.

I picked up the Pentium G4600 for some extra Linux benchmarking (along with a Kabylake Celeron that will be tested this week too on Phoronix). For those curious how a modern Intel Pentium CPU performs, I compared its performance to several other Intel CPUs on Clear Linux following our recent Core i7 7700K Linux review.

The CPUs up for this comparison were the Pentium G3258, Pentium G4400, and Pentium G4600. The Core CPUs were the i7 4770K, i7 4960X, Core i5 6500, Core i5 6600K, Core i3 7100, Core i5 7600K, and Core i7 7700K. For some Xeon data points were the E3-1235L v5, Xeon E3-1245 v5, and Xeon E3-1280 v5. Unfortunately this comparison was more limited than I had wanted, particularly for including more Core i3/i5 CPUs, but unfortunately two issues with Clear Linux around the network interfaces and UEFI support on older CPUs barred this comparison from being expended in time for today's benchmarks. Once I get it working on those older, lower-end systems I have available, I'll put out some more benchmarks.

The Pentium G4600 was tested so far with Fedora 25, Ubuntu 16.10, and Clear Linux and it's been working out fine. For testing was Clear Linux on all of the systems with the Linux 4.9 kernel, Xfce 4.12, X.Org Server 1.19.1, Mesa 17.0-devel, Beignet 1.3, and GCC 6.3. The Pentium G4600 system was running on a MSI Z270A PRO motherboard, 2 x 8GB DDR4-2400MHz memory, and a Samsung 950 PRO 256GV NVMe SSD.

Let's take a look at these early Pentium G4600 Kabylake Linux performance numbers using the Phoronix Test Suite.


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