Intel G3258 Overclocking Comparison – Ambient Vs Liquid Nitrogen

WHY IS SUBZERO BENCHING FUN

You are probably wondering why people get into subzero benchmarking. Subzero benchmarking is using any method of cooling that is under 0 degrees celsius such as Liquid Nitrogen (LN2), Dry Ice (DICE) or Phase Change coolers. People not only do subzero benchmarking for fun, but to also compete in competions on HWBot which have prizes from cash to hardware or both. The top players also get recognition from hardware manufactures in the form of sponsorship and even products named after them due to their achievements.

A lot people just like the thrill of benchmarking both ambient and subzero to see the best they can get out of their hardware. benchmarking is not limited to the latest best hardware on the market as many play with older generation hardware to try to beat scores of that generation.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This Gigabyte Z97X SOC Force is designed with benchers in mind having all the buttons for overclocking on the fly and voltage measuring points which makes this board attractive to competitive benchers. Another item which comes with the Motherboard is the PCIe Bracket (OC Brace) that attaches to the motherboard and makes for an easy testbench which is able to accommodate high-end graphics cards or any graphic card or PCI/PCIe device to be secured as if it was mounted in a PC case. The VRM heatsink is more than adequate to disperse heat from overclocking. This is helped by the use of digital MOSFET’s in return there is no need for additional cooling whilst running heavy loads. Also, as you can see, the board has the usual 8 pin EPS plug and an additional 4 pin EPS plug. The 4 pin is not needed even under heavy loads with LN2. The 8 pin delivers more than enough power to the CPU.

Intel’s decision to release an unlocked Pentium to mark the 20^th anniversary of the Pentium architecture has gained popularity for cheap PC builds for Small Business use or Gaming on a budget. The CPU has proved to be popular amongst benchers for some cheap LN2 fun. To get the best performance out of this CPU and other Haswell and Haswell Refresh CPU’s, finding the right Core speed and Uncore (Cache) speed via testing will help you find the optimum performance. In most cases with standard cooling the cache should be around 500Mhz below Core frequency. Although our results on LN2 were not spectacular, we did have a lot of fun playing with this 20^th Anniversary Pentium G3258 CPU in which provided some cheap fun.

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