Intel Pentium G3220 Processor Review

Final Thoughts & Conclusion

The Intel Pentium G3220 really left me surprised today. As a dual core processor I really wasn’t quite sure what to expect from it, especially in terms of gaming performance. I had a bit of an idea about the CPU intensive tasks and knew not to expect to much from the G3220 dual core during the processor intensive tests like Cinebench R15 and the x264 HD Video encoding benchmark. The Intel Pentium G3220 is only a 3.0GHz Pentium dual core processor and definitely wasn’t meant to contend with the Intel Core i7 4770K and the i5 4670K that are meant for completely different audiences. Though for only $67.63 it certainly held its own when it came to gaming!

The gaming performance of the Intel Pentium G3220 was definitely better than I though it would be across most of the games. What really surprised me though, was that the G3220 wasn’t the bottleneck at the higher gaming resolution! When we ran most of the gaming benchmarks at 1920×1080 we were limited by the ASUS Direct CUII NVIDIA GeForce GTX670 that we had in our test bench.

Gaming Performance at 1920×1080
Processor	Pentium G3220	Core i7-4770K
BIOSHOCK	82.31	88.63
Hitman: Absoluion	30.4	31.8
Tomb Raider	84.13	83.93
Sleeping Dogs	43.97	44.7
Metro Last Light	39.54	47.24

The only game that there was any real performance difference at 1920×1080 was Metro Last Light. The Pentium G3220 held an average of 83.7% of the performance of the i7-4770K. When running the Metro Last Light benchmark, the Intel Pentium G3220 processor was getting utilized quite a bit as we can see below:

Intel Pentium G3220 Metro Last Light CPU Usage:

Intel Core i7-4770K Metro Last Light CPU Usage:

Looking at the two different processor usages above, it’s easy to see why the Pentium G3220 struggled in Metro Last Light. The Intel Core i7-4770K is able to handle the game across all of it’s threads while the G3220 is limited to only the two logical cores.

By no means is the Intel Pentium G3220 dual core processor a beast. After all, it’s a dual core processor in a world where quad cores and more are prevalent. To be honest though, the Intel Pentium G3220 certainly performed quite a bit better than I had imagined that it would. I certainly wasn’t expecting the G3220 to keep up with the Intel Core i7 4770K in the CPU intensive tasks, what I was hoping for was that we would be able to game on it without much of an issue. For the most part that held true today! For a $67.63 processor I was impressed by it, and I may just toss it into a little LAN box for myself down the road!

Legit Bottom Line: The Intel Pentium G3220 proved itself to be a solid processor for those on a budget. If you are trying to build a gaming rig on a budget, you can pick up a processor like the Intel Pentium G3220 for only $67.63 and spend a little more on the graphics card!