Power Consumption and Temperatures
Power Consumption
This plucky little quad-core has much more to offer in terms of performance than I was expecting. What’s even more interesting is that it can do it by sipping so little power. It uses less than the 90w even at load. Of course, it’s less than that, but we’ve got some system overhead on there too.
Stock
Overclocked
Overclocking didn’t push it up too much either, still under 100W while stressing the CPU.
Temperatures
Low power consumption easily ties to the next test – temperatures. This chip is as cool as ice, and our Noctua NH-D15 made easy work of it. Even overclocking barely made a difference, and this may be one of those CPUs where the stock cooler is actually the best option. No point spending big money on cooling a budget chip.
Stock
Overclocked
Looks like the perfect chip for a midrange gaming machine; currently running a G3258 and haven’t felt any need to upgrade (web browsing, watching movies and games not very taxing) it’s running 4.5GHz on air quite happily! Do sometimes wonder if more cores would help, do get some pauses when multitasking or there’s a bunch of browser tabs open. Very happy to see AMD back in the CPU market, been no fan of their graphics hardware.
I run G3258 in my mini-ITX spare work rig and my girlfriends main PC. It’s amazing. Only problem is with games like Borderlands 2, it gets a little stuttery with higher graphics settings regardless of the GPU used, and worse now she has a 1440p display. The cores do help, but for the most part, it’s a real champ for day-to-day stuff. The 1200 and 1300X are in my opinion the AMD G3258. It’s almost twice the price, but it’s twice the cores too, so seems fair.