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Overclocking: the arcane art of brute-forcing more performance out of your components through a combination of raw voltage and increased clock-speeds. Back in the day, virtually any CPU could be overclocked, resulting in some colossal performance gains and a gargantuan increase in the all-important "bang for your buck" on select processors. Those days are mostly gone now, with Intel locking down multipliers and base-clocks for all but a small number of enthusiast-centric processors, but to celebrate those glory days, the firm has released the stealthily titled Pentium G3258 - a 20th anniversary special edition.On the face of it, the processor is nothing special. Imagine a 3.2GHz Core i3 based on the Haswell architecture with less cache and no Hyper Threading - that's effectively what the G3258 is. It's priced to match its lacklustre feature-set, coming in at under £45. However, beyond the obvious mediocrity, it is very special in one respect: the multiplier is unlocked, meaning you can overclock the hell out of it. Just how fast you can make it go depends on the quality of the chip you get and the amount of cash you spend on cooling it. Intel hasn't released an unlocked dual-core part for the last few generations, meaning we're in unknown territory here when it comes to getting the best out of it.
Certainly, the PC enthusiast sector is highly excited about the G3258. TechReport paints a remarkable picture of a 4.8GHz overclock seemingly able to play Crysis 3 as well as an AMD FX-8350, and even capable of matching Intel's high-end quad-core chips. Hexus talks about how you won't tell the difference between this and a Core i7 when paired with certain graphics hardware. Tom's Hardware talks about a "watershed moment" for Intel with the release of this processor. It's clear that a lot of people are very excited about what this Anniversary Edition processor is capable of.
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