Pentium articles

#ThrowbackThursday Enthusiasts' early overclocking endeavors involved soldering and replacing crystal clock oscillators, but evolving standards brought more accessible means to change system bus speeds, while the most daring would gain boosts through hard modding. These are but a few of the landmark processors revered for their overclocking prowess.

Not that long ago we reviewed the $60 Athlon 200GE CPU and we've been wanting to come back to it for more. So we've dug out the plucky little Zen based chip and for comparison grabbed the Ryzen 3 2200G and Intel's Pentium G5400.

There are now several Coffee Lake-based Pentium Gold chips starting at just $64. So we've decided to pit it against AMD's best value CPU, the Ryzen 3 2200G which is $100 but it gets you good integrated graphics. You have to wonder what's the best value between the two platforms.

Set at 3.5GHz, the Pentium G4560 is poised to be the bargain CPU of 2017. It's only 200MHz slower than the much loved Core i3-6100, amazing news for budget shoppers who had their eye on something like the i3-6100 because the G4560 has been stamped with an MSRP of only $64.

Take a look back at how Intel CPUs have progressed over the years. We're testing and comparing the original Core 2 Duo CPUs against the Nehalem-based Core i5-760 and Core i7-870, the Sandy Bridge Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2700K chips, and then to the current generation Haswell Celeron, Pentium, Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 parts.

For more than a decade tech-savvy users on a budget would commonly buy a sub-$100 CPU and achieve performance comparable to $200-$300 chips by overclocking. These days Intel locks down its lower end parts, but to mark the 20th anniversary of its Pentium brand, they've released a fully unlocked dual-core Pentium G3258 for $72 -- just what the overclocking community has been waiting for. We'll put it through its paces in a couple of builds of our own.