My personal G3220 impressions

[JumBie]

I grabbed a MOBO+CPU+RAM combo (G3220+Biostar H81S2+4GB DDR3) for $100 to replace an aging AMD 9550 2.2GHZ, 5GB DDR2 system that I had laying around. I have to say there are some good and bad things to note about this processor and I want to lay them out on the table for anyone who plans on purchasing this for their build.

Lets get started with the pros.

1. Coming from a quad core 2.2ghz Phenom, this 3.0Ghz dual core puts it to shame in the majority of games that I have tested it with. Mind you I am using an aging gtx 260, even still the g3220 allows for a higher and more consistent frame rate than the AMD x4.

2. Faster loading of certain programs, games load faster, and programs open up a lot quicker than the old AMD CPU.

For the average user that's about where the pros end. The cons may not effect everyone but here they are.

1. Multitasking is virtually non existent. Sure its a dual core, and sure that's to be expected but the old AMD x4 was able to handle multiple tabs and programs open at the same time without slowing down.

-The G3220 seems to have trouble with having more than just 2 or 3 things open at a time. For instance I can see a noticeable slow down when Steam, Youtube, Windows media player and a few Chrome tabs are all running. This may not be an issue for some, but I find this to be a huge problem.

-Downloading multiple files at a time causes a huge slow down, the old quad core showed no sign of this.

-Forget doing much else if something is installing. Web pages seem to grind to a halt and stop loading, while programs seem to take forever to open.

-Multiple display users will find that running a game in a borderless window and using the other monitor to watch a video or read will cause terrible performance issues in the game. (depending on the game)

Another personal issue that I am having, which others may not, is the fact that loading certain web pages seems to be slower than it was on the AMD cpu. Not sure what could be causing this as the two cores on the G3220 should be more than sufficient.

Quad cores that came out in 2008-09 will out perform this processor in everything but gaming, and single threaded performance.

People who should buy this:
Budget gamers
HTPC users (movies, videos, youtube)
Anyone who needs an office pc for basic tasks
Anyone who needs a home pc for basic tasks

This processor just struggles a lot when you throw multiple task at it. If you find yourself to be someone who loves to have multiple chrome tabs open with a few programs tossed in the mix, then the G3220 is not the processor for you.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Are you sure it's the CPU that is responsible for that slowdown? What OS are you running? It could be a scheduler issue, or something in the storage drivers or . . . well all I know is that your mention of installers made me wonder a bit about the actual source of slowdown.

In any case, two Haswell cores @ 3 ghz have such an enormous IPC advantage that they should be pretty much faster at everything compared to Agena @ 2.2 ghz. Context switching shouldn't murder the 3220 that horribly.

 

[lyssword]

weird, I have never ever had something as ridiculous as "slower downloads" (since downloads require almost no cpu power), and I am a very heavy tab user/play youtube in background even while playing cs:go. I had 3220 before replacing it with g3258 @4.6, and it has not been my experience.

 

[beginner99]

The mentioned downside rather point to a slow HDD than a slow cpu.

 

[greybaby]

Really multi tasking should still be faster on the 3220. It is hard to tell the difference, but as far as architecture is concerned, the 3220 will beat the agena at almost everything concerning normal use or gaming.

 

[DigDog]

i had the same cpu, for the money i think it's brilliant. perfect for someone who is building a system but has a limited budget, it allows you to get teh system up and running, and can be discarded at a later date with minimal loss. (thats what i did)

 

[escrow4]

No point going lower than an Intel i3. Anything lower is a fat old compromise. And that mobo is meh - no HDMI out, no ALC 1150 or 898 (HiFi HA!), 2 USB 3 ports, 2 USB 2 headers (its 2005!!!), no Intel NIC, 4 SATA connectors, etc. And Bioshart. Piffle. If you were using that old system up to now, you should have gone for an i3 (or i5) and a quality H97 mobo to really last another 5yrs. And before you mention budget, over 5yrs, an extra $200 or $300 is irrelevant especially compared to a frisbee mobo and CPU.

 

[JumBie]

Are you sure it's the CPU that is responsible for that slowdown? What OS are you running? It could be a scheduler issue, or something in the storage drivers or . . . well all I know is that your mention of installers made me wonder a bit about the actual source of slowdown.

In any case, two Haswell cores @ 3 ghz have such an enormous IPC advantage that they should be pretty much faster at everything compared to Agena @ 2.2 ghz. Context switching shouldn't murder the 3220 that horribly.

Windows 8.1 64 bit. There is nothing running in the background, what I meant was for instance say I install a program that I just downloaded, while the installer is running the computer starts to slow down. Web browsing becomes more difficult and often times web pages will hang. Opening up programs while installing another makes the process take even longer.

weird, I have never ever had something as ridiculous as "slower downloads" (since downloads require almost no cpu power), and I am a very heavy tab user/play youtube in background even while playing cs:go. I had 3220 before replacing it with g3258 @4.6, and it has not been my experience.

Not slower downloads. When I download multiple files at once the computer itself starts to slow down and doing anything else becomes harder. For example: If I have multiple torrent files downloading say 10 for instance, the web browser starts to slow down and opening files and folders takes longer (a lot longer)

The mentioned downside rather point to a slow HDD than a slow cpu.

I am using the same HDD that was in the old AMD system, its a 5400rpm Toshiba 550GB HDD. The problems that are seen here were not witnessed in the old system.

Really multi tasking should still be faster on the 3220. It is hard to tell the difference, but as far as architecture is concerned, the 3220 will beat the agena at almost everything concerning normal use or gaming.

I know that everything points to the G3220 being a faster processor all around, but this is what I noticed during my time with the processor. It does feel faster overall but the problems that I am facing seem to be due to its lack of 4 cores.

 

[JumBie]

No point going lower than an Intel i3. Anything lower is a fat old compromise. And that mobo is meh - no HDMI out, no ALC 1150 or 898 (HiFi HA!), 2 USB 3 ports, 2 USB 2 headers (its 2005!!!), no Intel NIC, 4 SATA connectors, etc. And Bioshart. Piffle. If you were using that old system up to now, you should have gone for an i3 (or i5) and a quality H97 mobo to really last another 5yrs. And before you mention budget, over 5yrs, an extra $200 or $300 is irrelevant especially compared to a frisbee mobo and CPU.

The mobo isn't really an issue, in fact I think people over spend on motherboards for features they do not and will not ever use. This motherboard provides me with enough USB slots, enough SATA ports, integrated gigabit lan and DVI support (don't need HDMI as I use a discrete card). Spending 40 dollars on this motherboard was worth every single penny.

 

[ShadowVVL]

I don’t think its the processor, but It could be the motherboard.I still run my amd athlon64 dual core which is way slower then the g3220 and I don’t get any such issues.

you could also try a different hdd or ssd and see if it changes anything.

 

[Lepton87]

2 threads are just awful nowadays as is HDD for anything other than media storage.

 

[cbn]

Why didn't you buy the Pentium G3258 like we discussed in this thread? ---> http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2401397&highlight=

P.S. Here is a good combo for you ---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130779

(MSI Z97 and Pentium G3258 for $89.99 After $10 rebate, free shipping)

 

[JumBie]

Why didn't you buy the Pentium G3258?

Here is a good combo for you ---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130779

Overclocking a dual core processor doesn't change the fact that its a dual core processor, its still going to lack the advantages that a quad core has. I didn't want to bother with overclocking the G3258 anyway.

 

[cbn]

Overclocking a dual core processor doesn't change the fact that its a dual core processor, its still going to lack the advantages that a quad core has. I didn't want to bother with overclocking the G3258 anyway.

It may be a just a dual core, but a 4.2+ Ghz on the stock cooler it will be much faster than that Phenom 9550 in quad threaded tasks.

P.S. Here is the video on how to overclock the exact board I linked --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE73o_5XWJw

 

[BSim500]

Downloading multiple files at a time causes a huge slow down, the old quad core showed no sign of this.

This makes no sense from a CPU bottleneck standpoint. I have an i3 in my HTPC, and even with HT disabled, web browsing, etc is silky smooth, and downloading takes up almost no CPU power at all - barely 10% usage with 6 downloads on a high speed connection for me. Many dual-core Intel mobile chips at 1.4-2.6GHz in laptops also have zero problems downloading with CPU usage under 15-20% Nor do netbooks with Intel Atoms...

Forget doing much else if something is installing. Web pages seem to grind to a halt and stop loading, while programs seem to take forever to open.

...which sounds far more like a HDD bottleneck. Web pages will be very slow on any CPU if you have a large web cache on a slow mechanical HDD. Try moving it to an SSD / Ramdisk and retest.

Overclocking a dual core processor doesn't change the fact that its a dual core processor, its still going to lack the advantages that a quad core has

The quad-core has zero advantages since each of the 4 cores runs less than half the speed... Both CPU's have similar multi-threaded Geekbench scores within 5% of each other (4,500-4,725). Single threaded the Pentium runs up to 2.3x faster, and a lot of web browsing / Javascript is single threaded.

Why don't you take a screenshot of CPU usage whilst downloading, so we can better see what's going on? If it "feels slow" when CPU usage is down, it's probably the usual HDD bottleneck. And if you're getting high idle CPU usage, then it may be driver issue, malware, etc.

 

[4ghz]

Like others have said its probably not the cpu. I'm currently using a g3258 oc'ed to 4.4 and I was able to torrent 6 files, start 3 youtube videos, play a video file(media player classic), have 10 firefox tabs open while playing Diablo 3 on my 2nd monitor without hitching. I was able to get my system to start hitching by playing 3 youtube videos, 12 video files and diablo 3. But cpu usage at that point was bouncing between 75% to 99%. That should of buried a Phenom I long ago. Unless your cpu usage is hitting a sustained 50% or more something else is up. I assume you did a clean install of Windows and installed all the chipset drivers?

 

[daveybrat]

I am using the same HDD that was in the old AMD system, its a 5400rpm Toshiba 550GB HDD. The problems that are seen here were not witnessed in the old system.

Yikes! A 5400RPM Desktop drive? Pop a small SSD in place of that and i can almost guarantee that most of your issues will vanish.

 

[eton975]

Yikes! A 5400RPM Desktop drive? Pop a small SSD in place of that and i can almost guarantee that most of your issues will vanish.

I am using the same HDD that was in the old AMD system, its a 5400rpm Toshiba 550GB HDD. The problems that are seen here were not witnessed in the old system.

Maybe it needs a defragment? Did OP properly reinstall Windows and chipset drivers after the migration?

Or maybe a program is clogging up one thread of the processor at all times. That means the G3220's 2 threads are indeed the issue.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yikes! A 5400RPM Desktop drive? Pop a small SSD in place of that and i can almost guarantee that most of your issues will vanish.

Yeah, upgrade should have included a 120+GB SSD, then OP wouldn't have those problems.

 

[eton975]

Yeah, upgrade should have included a 120+GB SSD, then OP wouldn't have those problems.

Why didn't the Phenom I system have the problem then?

 

[Charlie98]

I've got a G3220 system paired with a cheapo Gigabyte mobo (Desk3 in sig below) but it's paired with an SSD... I don't have any of those problems like you describe. No, it's not my i5 when gaming and trying to multitask, but I wouldn't expect it to be, but as far as GP use I joke that I can't tell much difference between the G3220 and my 2500K (in general tasks like browsing, streaming, audio encoding, etc.) In fact, I built an almost identical system (G3220, cheap ASRock mobo, Intel 530 SSD, 8GB RAM) for my in-laws and don't have the problems you describe.

 

[sm625]

Umm, I went from an overclocked i5-750 to a overclocked G3258. The i5-750 would totally destroy that phenom, but evenso, I would not go back, even though yes you do have to watch what's running in the background. Like updates and such. I've found it to not be a big enough deal for me. The the 100 mS sunspider score is just too much to give up.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Benchmarks only tell part of the story. When benchmarks are run for a website's review, they're typically on a clean system just running that one benchmark. For many of us, that isn't real life use and more cores / threads do help.

 

[Charlie98]

No point going lower than an Intel i3. Anything lower is a fat old compromise.

I always scratch my head over this argument. It's like saying every car on the road should have a V-8 because a 4- or 6-cylinder is always a compromise.

For a general purpose PC, a Pentium is perfectly adequate... and the G3258 has proven the Pentium is capable of even more than browsing and YouTube.

Following the logic of the comment above, and I realize this makes me a hypocrite... I don't know why Intel even bothers with the Celeron except for low-power and maybe imbedded processors.

 

[crashtech]

The G3220 has literally over three 2.5 times the ST performance as a 2.2GHz Phenom, so pick as many threads as you like, the G3220 will outperform the Phenom. Something else is going on here that might relate to the platform or OS, along with the fact that we are all human and suffer from such cognitive shortcomings as confirmation bias and buyer's remorse.