Who still remembers the days of Intel's Pentium lineup? During the socket 478 days these were quite powerful processors and on the right motherboard had much overclocking potential. Nowadays the word Pentium directly triggers automatic response as too slow or even poor performance; nevertheless this is only partly true as a dual core processor is still quite capable of powering a modern PC, though it will be quite hard to convince anybody as recent setups got a quad core processor or even better onboard.

Strangely enough Intel positioned its latest anniversary sibling in the low end region of the Pentium Haswell models. Quite a surprising act as one would think the unlocked G3258 would be the flagship of the Pentium series. Nevertheless this choice has a positive effect on the retail price, which will by far one of this Pentiums strong selling points.

Consider this Pentium Anniversary Edition as a Haswell refresh of the previous low end model, the G3240; add one 100Mhz to the core clock and keep all the rest besides the now unlocked multiplier unchanged.

This Pentium G3258 seems ready to attack AMD's affordable offerings alike the Athlon II X4 760K (FM2) and the FX-6300 (AM3+). The Pentium G3258 is compatible with Intel 8 and 9 series chipsets, this after a mandatory BIOS update. While usually only the high chipsets allowed K SKU multiplier overclocking, this time even the lower end H Chipset series will grant access to change the processor multiplier. Again a clear indication Intel is maximizing forces in the low end price range; nevertheless better check before choosing your components.