Intel Pentium G2020 disappointment

I had a spare Socket 1155 motherboard which I had bought for a customer's Intel Core i5 processor only to find that the CPU seemed to be broken. He decided to go for a completely new system to house his newly bought graphics card. I decided to purchase a cheap (£38) Intel Pentium G2020 CPU to make use of the excellent MSI B75MA-E33 Micro-ATX (£40) motherboard.

I assembled the system with 6GB of 1300MHz DDR3 memory and an OCZ Vertex 2 120Gb SSD. The system seemed responsive enough, but when I started benchmarking it the difference in CPU grunt compared to a modern Intel 'Haswell' Core-i3 4130 was obvious. Typically the older Pentium scored less that half that of the Core processor. This is also reflected in the prices of the two.

Also, if you buy this CPU and consequently Socket 1155 motherboard, you lock yourself into the older technology and the upgrade path is limited to the expensive, remnants of the 'Sandy and Ivy Bridge' Intel processors. The new Intel 'Haswell' chips use the Socket 1150 allowing a greater choice and any future developments in CPU technology.

Overall this was a disappointing build and I doubt if I will use a Pentium brand CPU again. The higher speed, Hyper-threading (adding an extra two logical cores) and larger cache of the Intel Core i3 CPU and hence overall performance is well worth the difference in price.