Earlier this year, Intel announced that it would launch a 20th Anniversary Pentium to coincide with the birthday of one of its most iconic architectures. The Pentium G3258 is a conventional dual-core (no Hyper-Threading) with a 3.2GHz base clock, no Turbo Mode, and a 3MB L3 cache. Unlike the rest of Intel’s product line, however, this core will be unlocked — though you’ll need to plug it into a Z87 or Z97 motherboard to take advantage of that fact.

With a base clock of 3.2GHz, the G3258 should slip in just above the Pentium G3420, which matches the chip in all particulars but isn’t unlocked. That core retails for $75, so an $80 list price on the Anniversary Pentium makes sense. The more interesting question, I think, is whether enthusiasts will cotton to the new core as a low-end alternative for overclocking. It’s been years since Intel allowed for overclocking on its lower-end processors, but once upon a time that feature drove the segment.

As some of you may know, back in 1998 there was a very famous (or is that infamous?) CPU called the Celeron 300A. As the name suggests, the chip (pictured top) was clocked at 300MHz by default — but by simply increasing the front-side bus (FSB) from 66MHz to 100MHz, a clock speed of 450MHz was easily obtainable. At 450MHz, the Celeron 300A became one of the fastest CPUs on the market. My editor, Sebastian, tells me that he once had a dual-Celeron PC, with both chips clocked at 550MHz. At the time, it was probably one of the fastest air-cooled desktop PCs in the world.

If Intel bins the new chips well, it could spark a mini-revival in enthusiast overclocking, particularly if these cores use the newer thermal interface material that the Devil’s Canyon Haswell parts utilize. Intel’s top-end chips are going to hit 4.4GHz Turbo Mode (reportedly), which means an enthusiast dual-core at 4.2GHz would be clocking in at 30% over stock. That was a decent OC in the old days, and it’d be an excellent achievement from a $75 chip today.

With the addition of Quick Sync support, a fast Intel dual-core would be a great option for a modest gaming rig or general system. While no dual-core will match a quad-core CPU for multithreaded applications, a dual-core G3258 clocked at 4-4.2GHz likely would match well against the stock Core i3-4330, which runs at 3.5GHz with Hyper-Threading enabled. Hyper-Threading typically improves performance by 15-20%; our hypothetical Pentium would be running 14-20% faster clock for clock. Result? $140 worth of performance in a $75-$80 chip. Those are the kind of ratios that made the Celeron 300A legendary — hopefully we’ll get an equivalent performer for the 21st century.