€60 G3258 + €600 GTX980 Benchmarks!

TerrorFirmer

Will add more benchmarks over the next few days! If anyone has any requests, ask away, and if I have it I'll add it. I hope to get through Shadow of Mordor, Tomb Raider, Advanced Warfare, and a few others shortly.

The G3258 is at 4.4Ghz @ 1.3v, can't get anything beyond without crashing at the moment. It's a Z97S Sli Plus, 8Gb of Ballistix 1600mhz (G3258 only support 1333mhz) and the star of the show, the Asus GTX980 Strix. We're looking at 10:90 split in terms of cost here for the CPU: GPU. :eek:

As mentioned in the other thread, Battlefield 4 presented a hiccup in that for reasons as of yet unknown, the game freezes for 1 to 2 seconds occasionally - hence the reading of 0fps as a minimum. A workaround is to enable half refresh v-sync, forcing the game to 30fps and resolving the rare freezing issue, but for the sake of consistency in these benchmarks I benched under normal circumstances.

Battlefield 4 Online

I've been messing around with this, and with a bit of tweaking it's freezing far less and for shorter period, just a few times per game. I suffered one freeze in an Operation Locker 64-man game earlier. 64 player Operation Locker and Paracel Storm were both totally playable overall in 64-man servers, with averages of about 50-60fps, a miracle for a €60 processor. GPU utilization was about 75% on average. The G3258 pushes good framerates but the lack of hyper-threading really hurts it.

Alien Isolation + Bioshock Infinite

Alien Isolation and Bioshock Infinite performed exceptionally well, with average framerates of about 150. I could utilize the GTX980 almost 100% in these games, something I could not do in most other games.

Ryse: Son of Rome

Ryse Son of Rome performed surprisingly well, with an average of 57 frames per second, once again excellent performance for a €60 processor in a fairly CPU intensive title. My last gaming laptop had AMD's flagship mobile Quad Core the A10-5750; even at 3Ghz that processor could barely break 30fps with an R9 290M, as a comparison. GPU utilization varied, between 70 and 95%.

Company of Heroes 2

Company of Heroes 2 is another fairly well balanced system-punisher at ultra settings, performance here was very respectable.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes

Metal Gear: Ground Zeroes was disappointing, no option beyond 1080p, and generally poor performance considering how the game looks, but overall very acceptable gameplay from a figures point of view. GPU utilization would not rise above approx 55% however, even when I altered entirely GPU dependent settings and the framerate suffered...strange one.

Metro: Last Light

Metro Last Light ran exceptionally well, similar to Ryse Son of Rome, very strong average frames and utilization that jumped between 65 and 95%.

Conclusion

So far, it's a mixed bag. Some games are clearly heavily CPU bound; Battlefield 4 in particular, MGS: Ground Zeroes wasn't too happy with the G3258 either. They're still perfectly playable - but for these games, and games that are similar in hardware requirements, it's clear that an i3 or i5 and something like an R9 280X+ would be the far superior option.

Other games are far more forgiving - Alien Isolation and Bioshock Infinite, two beautiful games, don't care what they're running on and the GTX980 was utilized almost to its full potential. Metro Last Light isn't too fussy either, nor was Ryse Son of Rome, another pair of visually fantastic games that are very punishing on video cards.

TerrorFirmer

Just edited the charts to make them more accurate, noticed the other ones were not coming out right for minimum framerates.

I haven't tried the CPU on any other board, I have a H81 I might try if I get a chance at some stage.

Serephucus

Now do 4790K benchmarks to compare. :P

btkm8unsl0w5r4

What tool are you using for the FPS readings?

TerrorFirmer

Serephucus wrote: »

Now do 4790K benchmarks to compare. :P

I have a 4930K but no board at the moment.

Yara Important Minefield wrote: »

What tool are you using for the FPS readings?

Fraps benchmarking!

challengemaster

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

Fraps benchmarking!

Steam have added a FPS counter in the latest update.

Slutmonkey57b

Excellent stuff Terror. Comparison benchmarks against whatever else you've got would be great though, particularly for showing if the minimum frame rates are game engine or cpu dependent.

Good to see that the Pentium is holding its own!

TerrorFirmer

I don't have anything else to hand at the moment, a 4930k but no motherboard for it, have an Fx6300 somewhere as well I think. I will check.

I included GPU utilisation to give an indication of bottleneck, the GPU was only being fully used in Bioshock Infinite and Alien Isolation at 2560x1080 Ultra with AA.

Most other games varied, some shifted between 65-90, but on the whole, I'd say on average the GTX980 was only about 70% utilized across the board.

Battlefield 4 was the worst bottlenecked, though performance was still playable - but then again it is only one game. It would very much depend on the types of games being played as to how you worked out the best match for the G3258, though I think on average from the figures, something like an R9 280x is about the sweet spot.

Slutmonkey57b

Price/Performance 280x+3285 is very sweet indeed.

brevity

Planning on using this chip in a budget build myself! Wont be spending as much on the graphic card though. Here is my proposed build

PCPartPicker part list:

CPU: Intel Pentium G3258 3.2GHz Dual-Core Processor (£48.99 @ Ebuyer)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler (£25.34 @ Scan.co.uk)
Motherboard: Asus H81M-A Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£40.67 @ Ebuyer)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£58.69 @ Ebuyer)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£40.39 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: Asus GeForce GTX 760 2GB DirectCU II Video Card (£154.73 @ Ebuyer)
Case: Zalman ZM-T3 MicroATX Mini Tower Case (£19.47 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: Corsair CX 500W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (£49.60 @ Aria PC)
Total: £437.88

Will see how it goes!

Idunno442

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

Price/Performance 280x+3285 is very sweet indeed.

good to hear

TerrorFirmer

Figured out that by disabling Origin in-game feature, it stops the majority of the stuttering I was suffering in BF4. Benchmark below for BF4 at 4K resolution with Gtx980 and OC'd G3258 on 64 player. GPU utilization: 80-100%.

harrymagina

Have the g3258 overclocked to 4.3ghz at 1.27 volts with an R9 280 on a H81 board.

Could you let me know how Far cry 4 runs. Heard there was some issues with performance. Cheers.

Luck100

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

Figured out that by disabling Origin in-game feature, it stops the majority of the stuttering I was suffering in BF4. Benchmark below for BF4 at 4K resolution with Gtx980 and OC'd G3258 on 64 player. GPU utilization: 80-100%.

Yes, I think it's actually a conflict between Origin overlay and any other overlay you have running at the same time (like afterburner or maybe fraps).