Is the Pentium G4620 The First Decent Stopgap in Years?

[poofyhairguy]

One of my favorite tricks for building a nice rig on a budget back in the day was buy a new platform where everything was top notch- RAM, mobo, etc.- except for the CPU. The CPU would just be a stopgap until years later when you could get a top chip for that platform for cost savings that were greater than what the original stopgap CPU cost. The fact that almost every CPU could be OCed back then made waiting on the stopgap CPU not a painful experience.

Every since Sandy that practice seems foolhardy. Not only does it take longer for CPUs to fall off in value, but there hasn't really been a chip below a i3 that a serious user or gamer could survive on as a stopgap even with OC. You either went i5 or i7 day one or you were wasting money. That makes changing platforms very costly all at once, which pretty much forces some people to cut corners on say the mobo or RAM or GPU to afford that i5. We have needed a stopgap that wasn't there.

I tried to give the G3258 a chance, but it failed. It didn't matter how fast I could get the two cores, just having two threads meant even weak games like Rocket League stuttered. It was not the stopgap I was looking for.

But maybe the Pentium G4620 is finally a decent stopgap? Four threads means recent i3 performance in gaming, and even though its locked I bet it could still keep up with a 2500 non-k for the task.

Part of the question also comes down to cost. It looks like the Pentium G4620 will be sub-$100. Looking at 6700k prices, that chip was $370+ for months after launch, with some deal prices as low as $290 a year later when the demand had dropped. If history repeats that gives us a gap of $80 of possible savings if someone waits to buy a 7700k until its the best price possible. If the Pentium G4620 can be had for around $80, and its decent usage-wise, then there is no penalty for "getting by" on a Pentium G4620 for a year.

Is the Pentium G4620 the stopgap I dream it will be? Or will it fail gamers like the G3258, or have jacked up prices due to high demand for the early months of its existence? Thank you for any thoughts.

 

[NTMBK]

Might work, if Zen manages to crater the price on used i7s.

 

[dullard]

It just isn't worth it. I used to have that attitude when the top CPUs were in the $600 to $1000 range. Get a CPU for $200 or less, then quickly upgrade when that $1000 CPU is just $200 or less. It saves you hundreds of dollars and you could do it in a short period of time so you aren't stuck with the subpar CPU for long.

But now, with top CPUs at about $350, you just don't save enough. It isn't worth waiting ~3 years for the 7700k to drop in price, all while using a subpar G4620 to maybe save a few dozen dollars. Add in the overclock cost, time wasted, effort, the fact that you are still using a subpar CPU for years, and the need to continually search for deals, it just doesn't save enough.

For example, the top Haswell, Broadwell, and Skylake CPUs are still right at about launch price. How long do you have to wait to get them to drop sufficiently in price (unless you snag a great occasional deal)? By then, you have a motherboard that is out of date and the upgrade isn't worth it.

I'm probably snagging a 7600 next month and will be done with it. I'll save $130 over the 7700K and won't notice a thing without any effort.

 

[crashtech]

Are there any benchmarks out there? The time where a dual core, even a 4T one, can be used in a gaming rig is coming quickly to a close.

 

[Conroe]

Zen looks good for the mid to high end but what has AMD got for this? It's probably nearly as fast as anything they have now.

 

[poofyhairguy]

It just isn't worth it. I used to have that attitude when the top CPUs were in the $600 to $1000 range. Get a CPU for $200 or less, then quickly upgrade when that $1000 CPU is just $200 or less. It saves you hundreds of dollars and you could do it in a short period of time so you aren't stuck with the subpar CPU for long.

But now, with top CPUs at about $350, you just don't save enough. It isn't worth waiting ~3 years for the 7700k to drop in price, all while using a subpar G4620 to maybe save a few dozen dollars. Add in the overclock cost, time wasted, effort, the fact that you are still using a subpar CPU for years, and the need to continually search for deals, it just doesn't save enough.

But what if the 7700k gets a jacked up price for months like the 6700k did? There was a while there where it was very hard to buy one for under $400.

What if Zen comes along and changes the price structure for all CPUs later this year as noted above?

What if one day we can stick a Coffee Lake six core CPU in a Z270 board? And the stopgap is for more than a 7700k?

Maybe the answer is "no, no, just don't" but I am ever hopeful.

I bought a G3258 and a built a whole rig around it for a reason - half the fun in computing in the time I have done it is beating the system with OCed Celerons and unlocked GPUs. If this hobby turns into purely "you get what you pay for" with no gaming of the system to be had then a lot of the magic is lost.

 

[Conroe]

I've been looking at Z270 motherboards and many say they support BCLK overclocking but none say anything about non-k overclocking. Asrock has Hyper BCLK engine II, Asus has Asus pro clock technology and I've seen the BCLK setting in other BIOS pics too. I'd like to know if it works with locked CPUs or not but no reviews I've seen even mention anything about it. I'd like to overclock my 6500 and get a new Pentium for my HTPC.

 

[Shivansps]

I dont know, the G4620 is barely cheaper than a I3-6100...

The G4560 is the budget champion for me, its dirt cheap, and i dont see any other difference with G4620 other than HD630 and 200mhz...

 

[whm1974]

Are there any benchmarks out there? The time where a dual core, even a 4T one, can be used in a gaming rig is coming quickly to a close.

If it hasn't already, at least for newer games coming out this year and in the future.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I dont know, the G4620 is barely cheaper than a I3-6100...

The G4560 is the budget champion for me, its dirt cheap, and i dont see any other difference with G4620 other than HD630 and 200mhz...

Fair enough. Both have four threads which is the real game changer.

 

[lopri]

Hyperthreading is a performance negative on desktop for many workloads. I do not think the extra two virtual cores will help much in situations where 4 actual cores are called for.

Having said that, 3.70 GHz dually should be plenty of horsepower for a lot of mundane daily tasks. I just do not think it will cut it for gamers and enthusiasts, however.

 

[LTC8K6]

Hyperthreading is a performance negative on desktop for many workloads. I do not think the extra two virtual cores will help much in situations where 4 actual cores are called for.

Having said that, 3.70 GHz dually should be plenty of horsepower for a lot of mundane daily tasks. I just do not think it will cut it for gamers and enthusiasts, however.

Link to first claim for a 2c/4t chip, please.

 

[ninaholic37]

Link to first claim for a 2c/4t chip, please.

edit: Nevermind, I misread your question. You are asking how a 2c/4t performs worse than a 2c/2t, not for a link showing that Kaby Lake is the first Pentium that is 2c/4t (I think).

 

[The Stilt]

I've been looking at Z270 motherboards and many say they support BCLK overclocking but none say anything about non-k overclocking. Asrock has Hyper BCLK engine II, Asus has Asus pro clock technology and I've seen the BCLK setting in other BIOS pics too. I'd like to know if it works with locked CPUs or not but no reviews I've seen even mention anything about it. I'd like to overclock my 6500 and get a new Pentium for my HTPC.

Non-K overclocking was made possible by a debug microcode, which disabled the PMU.
Since Kaby Lake uses different microcodes (AFAIK), there won't be similar OC exploit for Kaby Lake unless Intel somehow manages to repeat their mistake and slip such microcode again.

 

[LTC8K6]

I found the info in ark.intel.com

http://ark.intel.com/products/97460/Intel-Pentium-Processor-G4620-3M-Cache-3_70-GHz

http://ark.intel.com/products/97143/Intel-Pentium-Processor-G4560-3M-Cache-3_50-GHz

Interesting that Pentium and i3 are both 2c/4t now?

http://ark.intel.com/products/codename/82879/Kaby-Lake#@Desktop

You misunderstood me. I want a link to the claim that HT slows down many desktop workloads, particularly with a 2c/4t chip.

 

[crashtech]

Hyperthreading is a performance negative on desktop for many workloads...

Many workloads? No it's not.

 

[escrow4]

Why are people so tight when it comes to PCs? You use it near every single day without fail. Its not like its a $5 shirt from Kmart and a $500 Gucci ultra special shirt. Its tech. Stop being such a tight arse and build a proper box the first time. It has never made sense to buy cheap and then upgrade in some mythical future.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I once believed in the "stopgap solution" style of building PCs too. I built my S775 rigs, with really nice Gigabyte P35-DS3R mobos, for $130 ea., and filled them with E2140 CPUs, the cheapest Conroe solutions I could find, that could be overclocked nearly 100%. Then maybe 3-4 years later, I picked up some Q9300 CPUs at Microcenter for $100 ea., to upgrade them. (Original price of the Q9300s at release, was probably $250, maybe higher?)

So, the stopgap solution worked for me, once.

But now, I don't really know. Prices on CPUs don't really fall that much, until they are REALLY obsolete (hard to find mobos for).

And Microcenter doesn't really have much for "clearance" CPU sales anymore.

I guess, if all you need is a G4560 (or G4600, with the HD630), then get that. (I plan to.) But if you really want a 7700K, might as well bite the bullet and buy it up front.

The only hope that I see for a stopgap solution working this generation, is if Zen is successful, and craters Intel CPU prices. (But if that's true, then wouldn't you rather have a Zen CPU yourself, rather than your Intel rig anyways?)

 

[Ancalagon44]

I've also noticed this. You don't even save that much on a used i7 anymore. They just don't really drop in price.

I'm also not convinced that Intel will drop prices once AMD Ryzen releases. They have a very strong market position and right now, AMD isn't really a threat to them. Maybe one year after Ryzen releases, if it is making serious traction in the market, then Intel will drop prices.

 

[PG]

A stopgap in my opinion is cheap, performs well, and is easily available. This isn't so cheap, isn't available, and I can't find a review or even a passmark score. It's too early to call it much of anything yet.
Oh, the the prices I see online aren't too far off from an i3-6100 at Microcenter, which can be had with bundle pricing.

 

[whm1974]

A stopgap in my opinion is cheap, performs well, and is easily available. This isn't so cheap, isn't available, and I can't find a review or even a passmark score. It's too early to call it much of anything yet.
Oh, the the prices I see online aren't too far off from an i3-6100 at Microcenter, which can be had with bundle pricing.

On top of this, all the motherboards available are Z270 ones. So you are not really saving any money.

 

[PingSpike]

Link to first claim for a 2c/4t chip, please.

This sort of came up in another thread. Its a surprisingly untested thing on major sites, even though you can just disable HT in the bios. I saw a forum post for i7 4 core where through a lot of gaming benchmarks they guy had marginal losses on almost all his games with HT enabled with a couple ones that took a pretty big hit. Where it helped it surprisingly didn't help much.

On i3s though I really couldn't find much. I found German hardware site that suggested for 2 cores the 4 threads really did help in games by quite a bit. But I might have been reading it wrong. Google translate doesn't work on image graphs.

Its to bad some one with a lot of games, a fair amount of time and an i3 couldn't test this for us...

 

[Conroe]

On top of this, all the motherboards available are Z270 ones. So you are not really saving any money.

Cheap h110 boards support it with the latest BIOS. It may not POST with the old BIOS and I sure none are shipping with the new BIOS yet. It's still a good upgrade from a Skylake Celeron or Pentium.

I doubt it is much behind a i3 6100. Faster RAM really seems to help Skylake. B250 will support 2400mhz. There are some B250 motherboards out now.

 

[whm1974]

Cheap h110 boards support it with the latest BIOS. It may not POST with the old BIOS and I sure none ore shipping with the new BIOS yet. It's still a good upgrade from a Skylake Celeron or Pentium.

I would still want an upgraded chipset to go along with it if I was building a new system.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'd want at the least, an H270 to go with it, really, if I were building new. My wants involve previously-purchased ASRock DeskMini mini-STX PCs, with H110-chipset mobos that fit the mini-STX case, which take Kaby Lake CPUs with a BIOS update.