 Today's video is a true David versus Goliath epic showdown, a battle royale between the mouse and the Minotaur, a colossal clash between Cthulhu and a Care Bear that... Okay, yeah, I'm probably selling this a little bit hard, but the point of today's video is to take a real underdog competitor, the Intel Pentium G3258, and see how well it can compete with Intel's top-of-the-line Core i7-5960X, if we give it as much help as we can. So stay tuned for that, and another upcoming CPU benchmarking experimentation video, where I'll be taking that same Extreme Edition chip that we'll be looking at here, and seeing if I can manipulate it to simulate the performance of other Intel CPUs in benchmarks. From December 13th to 20th, 2014, you can save on select Intel CPUs, NUCs, and SSDs with special holiday rebates from select retailers. Click now to learn more. So let's take a moment to meet today's competitors. In the right corner, wearing blue trunks, is a Core i7-5960X, an 8-core monster of a processor that's clocked at 3 GHz nominal and turbo boosts up to 3.5. It features hyper-threading for a total of 16 processing threads. It supports DDR4 memory, quad-channel to boot, and is the meanest desktop CPU on the block, with the only real knock against it being the $1000 price tag. And in the left corner, wearing, I guess they're also blue trunks, is the Pentium G3258, anniversary edition. Now, Pentium processors used to be top of the line, but these days, Intel kind of uses the brand on only their most budget-oriented desktop CPUs with very, very low specs. I mean, in fact, this one only features two processing cores in an era when four is the norm, no hyper-threading for better handling of multiple tasks per core, a lowly 3.2 GHz clock speed, and worst of all, it doesn't have the ability to boost up the frequency of its cores dynamically with turbo boost, so it's stuck running at 3.2 GHz all the time. Not much of a sales pitch, right? Yeah, Linus, actually, this thing sounds awful. Why are you even interested in it? Well, since you asked, the G3258 is an exceptional piece of hardware for two reasons. One, it's only 70 bucks and has the same underlying architecture as the rest of Intel's Haswell CPUs, including that Extreme Edition, albeit with less cash. And two, that 3.2 GHz is a little misleading when you can spend literally 30 seconds overclocking this bad boy to 4.5 GHz or more. With 1.35 volt, I was rock-solid stable at 4.7 GHz. So with single-threaded performance, it's theoretically 25% better than what the 5960X can achieve at stock speeds. Maybe some of our tests, gaming anyone, won't look so one-sided after all. So let's get into the test. I ran both configurations with 16 gigs of DDR3-1866 and DDR4-2400 according to platform compatibility. Both of them ran an ASUS GTX 970 Strix graphics card for all game tests, and both were cooled by a Corsair H60 Liquid Cooler. We'll start with the gaming results. All games were run at 1080p since most gamers are still using that resolution, and frankly, I was really hoping for better from the Pentium Anniversary Edition. Even overclocked, thanks to the constantly improving ability of modern games to leverage the 5960X's additional processing cores, the Pentium's higher frequency was only able to give it the upper hand in Tomb Raider 2013. But the good news here is that with the exception of Crysis 3, the Pentium didn't bottleneck even a 300-plus dollar graphics card to the point where minimum frame rates fell so drastically below that magical 60fps mark that it was unpleasant to play. So it's not a win for the G3258 in the conventional sense, but considering that it costs less than 1-fourteenth as much and delivers a passable experience, even a good experience when overclocked, I can't rag on it too hard here. Non-gaming results were, as expected, much worse. Not having additional processing cores in any multi-threaded workload like the 3D rendering results in Cinebench and POVRay and popular compression utility 7Zip made this a bloodbath. So don't expect the G3258 to perform well for tasks like video editing, and remember that the point of our test was to find out how close we could get the G3258 to the 5960X's default speed, and there's actually even headroom on that bad boy as well. So it actually looks even closer than it is. I mean, for heavy multitasking, like what we did in this video, where I actually tried to create the most ridiculous scenario that I could to max out an 8-core CPU, more processing cores really are needed these days with as many as possible being a pretty nice luxury. But, it's conclusion time now, I guess, life is rarely as simple as picking out whichever one seems most luxurious and going with that, and cost is always a factor. You may have noticed that I stealthily included the Core i5-4670K on all these graphs from before. That was no accident. At 240 bucks for actually the 4690K, which is even slightly faster, the bang for the buck proposition looks pretty good compared to the Extreme Edition, and while it doesn't deliver as much value per dollar in a lighter task as our little, you know, David G3258, it also won't run into a straight-up performance wall like the Pentium did in Crysis 3, where minimum frame rates dropped to 14 FPS, making the game an unplayable, stuttery mess. So that's why most people end up with something more like a Core i5 at the end of their shopping experience. But I'd like to hear from you guys in the comments, who do you think was the big winner in today's showdown? And while you guys give that some thought, I'll tell you how you too can be a big winner. Join Dollar Shave Club today at dollarshaveclub.com slash Linus to start getting high-quality lawnmowers delivered straight to your door once a month, which you can use to do your landscaping and... Wait a minute. Who would want a new lawnmower every month? That's not what they do. Dollar Shave Club sends you high-quality razors, so you can still do the landscaping you need to do and even shave your face as well. It costs only a few dollars a month to start looking great and feeling great, and they're constantly adding new products to their portfolio with peppermint-scented butt wipes and Dr. Carver's shave butter and aftershave products already available. So head over to dollarshaveclub.com slash Linus to start shaving time and shaving money. Thanks for watching, guys. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment about the thing I asked before, who won the showdown? Pah, showdown. Bro, whatever. Anyway, there's a link in the video description if you want to help support us. You can give us a monthly contribution, buy a cool t-shirt like this one, or change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code. All those things help us out a lot. 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