Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The Intel Pentium G620 might be a stripped down ‘Sandy Bridge’ processor, but it did fairly well in all of our tests. It was slower than the other processors that we tested it against, but it was also the least expensive at $73.87 shipped. The next closest processor in price was the AMD A6-3650 Llano APU at $119.99 shipped. This makes the Intel Pentium G620 $46 less than the AMD A6-3650. This processor should get the attention of budget system builders since it does cost so little and is still a capable processor even though many features have been disabled on the processor. It would be nice to have turbo boost or quick sync video on this processor, but if those features were enabled the price would have had to been increased.

While the Intel Pentium G620 won’t be breaking any performance records or smashing and overclocking world records, it was able to complete all the benchmarks we threw at it and that is all that you can ask of a budget minded processor. This is one of those processors, where it can do pretty much everything an average consumer would want, but they’ll just have to wait longer for some CPU intensive tasks to complete. If you plan on doing a ton of movie ripping and conversions then this is not the ideal processor for you. This processor is good for someone that surfs the web, watches Blu-ray or DVD content, manages photo albums, does moderate image editing, office tasks and very light 3D gaming. For normal day-to-day tasks this processor is really all you need. Those looking for a little more power from this processor can overclock it to get a slight performance boost. The fact that we were able to overclock it and get 150MHz more clock speed of it was a success in our books.

One thing that we noticed is that the Intel Pentium G620 had the same gaming performance as the Intel Core i3-2120. The Intel Core i3-2120 has a clock frequency of 3.3GHz and Hyper-Threading. With a 700MHz higher clock speed you’d expect the Intel Core i3-2120 to perform better than a Pentium G620, but that was not the case. Both the Intel Pentium G620 and Intel Core i3-2120 were found to have identical 3D gaming performance and that makes sense as both share Intel HD Graphics 2000 GPU’s. If you are worried about just GPU performance the Pentium G620 should be given a closer look. The most impressive part of this processor is that it exactly the same gaming performance as processors that cost nearly twice as much!

Legit Bottom Line: The Intel Pentium G620 is a dual-core processor with a stripped down 32nm ‘Sandy Bridge’ processor that is aimed at entry level desktop PCs.