Intel’s Core processors are the powerful chips the company sells for personal computing. But, what if you want to build a low-performance office PC or a media consumption PC? Intel’s old state-of-the- art Pentium lineup is here to save your day. These chips are extremely cost-effective, and thus anyone might want to build a low-cost gaming setup with them. But, is this a good decision? Let us find out.
What are Intel’s Pentium Processors?
The Pentium lineup is an entry-level offering from Intel. These chips are slightly more powerful than the offerings in the Celeron lineup but are slightly slower than the Core i3 processors of the same generation. Intel has divided the Pentium lineup into two series. These include the slightly less powerful Intel Pentium Silver lineup, and the more capable Intel Pentium Gold lineup. To put it simply, the Pentium Silver processors are beefed-up versions of the much weaker Intel Celeron processors. The Pentium Gold processors are a slightly turned down version of the Core i3 lineup.
Are Intel Pentium Silver Processors Good for Gaming?
The Pentium Silver is too weak to handle some of the latest games. Intel did not build either of these lineups to handle some of the latest AAA titles on the market. Although you can get some form of respectable performance levels with the Pentium Gold chips, we do not recommend the Pentium Silver chip unless all you want to do is play PlayStation 2 era games.
Are Intel Pentium Gold Processors Good for Gaming?
The Pentium Gold chips are quite performing. They have significantly lesser cores and threads as compared to a Core i3 chip. Also, their clock speeds are severed. But, the single-core performance of the Pentium Gold and Core i3 chips stack up pretty well. Let us look at an example. Intel launched the Pentium Gold G6600 and Core i3-10100 based on the same Comet Lake architecture. While the former has a Cinebench R20 single-core score of 422, the Core i3-10100 beats it only by 6 points and manages to get 428.
Games do not require a bunch of cores to perform well. While having extra cores is always a brownie point, most games cannot fully utilize more than two cores at a time. Thus, the fact that Pentium processors miss out on core count gets minimized due to the way AAA games distribute the load. Also, gaming is a graphics-intensive task. Thus, if you pair a strong graphics processor with a Pentium Gold chip, you can play many well-optimized games on the market.
So, you can get away with a Pentium Gold chip as long as you have a decent graphics card. A GTX 1050 Ti or the GTX 1650 Super is the minimum we suggest. But, the performance will not be optimal, and an upgrade to one of the quad-core Core i3 chips is necessary.