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Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2011 8:20 am
by Apoptosis
Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Did you know that on May 22, 2011 that Intel released the companies first Pentium processors that utilize the Intel 32nm Sandy Bridge architecture? The Intel Pentium processor family is comprised of three new SKUs, called the G620, G840 and G850. We have the Intel Pentium Processor G620 on the test bench to find out how this 2.6GHz dual-core processor does!

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One thing that we noticed is that the Intel Pentium G620 had the same gaming performance as the Intel Core i3-2120. The Intel Core i3-2120 has a clock frequency of 3.3GHz and Hyper-Threading. With a 700MHz higher clock speed you'd expect the Intel Core i3-2120 to perform better than a Pentium G620, but that was not the case. Both the Intel Pentium G620 and Intel Core i3-2120 were found to have identical performance and that makes sense as both share Intel HD Graphics 2000 GPU's.

Article Title: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1665/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $73.87 Shipped

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2011 11:04 am
by Cliffro
I would have liked to see some tests with discrete graphics. Since we all know most of the IGP's suck pretty bad. Even the good ones still kinda suck.

Good review none the less.

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2011 12:59 pm
by Apoptosis
Cliffro wrote:I would have liked to see some tests with discrete graphics. Since we all know most of the IGP's suck pretty bad. Even the good ones still kinda suck.

Good review none the less.
I thought about that, but what card would you want to see?

I thought about putting a GTX580 or Radeon HD 6990 on there to see how the CPU's scale, but then thought it was silly to put a $400+ video card on a $70 CPU.

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2011 1:35 pm
by Cliffro
Apoptosis wrote:I thought about putting a GTX580 or Radeon HD 6990 on there to see how the CPU's scale, but then thought it was silly to put a $400+ video card on a $70 CPU.
I agree it would be silly, however a cheaper card in the range of GTX450/HD5770 -GTX 560/HD6870 might be a little more realistic.

Though the more I think about it, with Intel pretty much eliminating the super cheap, but highly overclockable CPUs, these really wouldn't be very appealing to gamers(even ones on a budget).

I just switched(temporarily I think) to AMD because of the lack of overclocking on anything but the K series and I was on a very small budget for my upgrades.

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2011 1:02 am
by ET3D
Radeon 6570 would be a good choice, IMO. Its price together with the G620 is around the price of the A8-3850, and it would be interesting to see how gaming results compare. I imagine that the G620+6570 would end up a little faster and still have lower total system power draw.

That said, a higher end card such as the 6850 might be a better real world choice for gaming, assuming the G620 has enough power to drive it. It might feel funny to put a $150 graphics card alongside a $70 CPU, but it could work out better than a $100 card with a $120 CPU, and certainly better than a $50 card with a $170 CPU. :)

Cliffro, I think that overclocking is only important to hardware enthusiasts, and not all gamers are hardware enthusiasts. Low end Sandy Bridge processors offer good gaming performance and since most games don't take good advantage of lots of cores, it's possible that the G620 is an entirely viable option if gaming on a budget is the main use of the PC.

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2011 5:52 pm
by WindSlash
It seems rather odd to have obtained a WEI CPU score of 7.6 and RAM score of 7.9 with the Pentium G620. Can you double check on those? I suspect that the CPU score would be around 6.8-6.9 since i3-2100 yields around 7.1-7.2 and i5-2500K yields 7.7+...

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:34 pm
by Apoptosis
WindSlash wrote:It seems rather odd to have obtained a WEI CPU score of 7.6 and RAM score of 7.9 with the Pentium G620. Can you double check on those? I suspect that the CPU score would be around 6.8-6.9 since i3-2100 yields around 7.1-7.2 and i5-2500K yields 7.7+...
sure I can re-check them... I did run it twice and it was the same...


Intel Core i3-2120:

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Intel Pentium G620:

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test system is identical... same Crucial C300 256GB SSD, 1866MHz memory and drivers... Look at the HDD score difference.

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2011 8:04 pm
by Major_A
This is what I expected, better Intel performance for the mundane apps. So does the AMD still get the vote?
http://forums.legitreviews.com/about35757.html

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 1:21 am
by WindSlash
Apoptosis wrote: sure I can re-check them... I did run it twice and it was the same...
test system is identical... same Crucial C300 256GB SSD, 1866MHz memory and drivers... Look at the HDD score difference.
Thank you for double checking! It just seemed weird that a G620 can obtain 7.6 where an overclocked i5-2500K (to 4.5 GHz) would get 7.7 (well, they say to take WEI scores as a grain of salt). I wonder if the MB, faster RAM, and/or larger/faster SSD actually helped improving the CPU score.

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 5:44 am
by Apoptosis
Major_A wrote:This is what I expected, better Intel performance for the mundane apps. So does the AMD still get the vote?
http://forums.legitreviews.com/about35757.html
Depends on what you are looking for, but the AMD A-Series APU really does deliver a balanced system and this chip has 'broken graphics drivers' that are making it a not so good experience for benchmarking.

I've been working with Intel to get some new graphics drivers.

I couldn't get PCMark 7 or Espresso to run on the Intel HD 2000 Graphics on this CPU due to a driver issue:

Furturemark:
This issue has been identified as an Intel display driver issue and should be addressed in future driver releases.

PCMark 7 will take advantage of hardware accelerated MFT:s if the driver reports them to be available and in this case it indeed looks like the QuickSync is reported to be available even if the CPU does not actually support it and thus causes the driver to crash.
Cyberlink:
Thanks for your notification.

Could you let me know your VGA driver version and MediaEspresso version?

I’ve brought this to our product development team and will get back to you as soon as we can.
Intel:
FYI, our driver team says there is a fix being implemented
So, it looks like i discovered a driver bug with Intel Quick Sync Video still showing up as enabled in the driver even though it is disabled on the CPU. This is causing applications that try to use Intel Quick Sync Video to crash or not properly work. I also think that this is the reason that the Windows Experience Score is messed up as it is showing things enabled that aren't or it too isn't running right. I have an Intel G850 sitting here, but didn't benchmark it after all the driver issues I was having with the G620. Once Intel drops a new driver I'll get back to CPU testing.

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 5:57 am
by Apoptosis
Late last night I was given word that Intel has released a new driver called 8.15.10.2462 for those that run Intel HD Graphics.

You can download it here - http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... 2&lang=eng

I tried these drivers out today to see if they fix my issues.
new-driver.jpg
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The GPU-Z shot of the 2462 drivers installed
new-wei.jpg
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The Windows Experience Index Score has changed yet again.
mediashow-new.jpg
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Cyberlink Esspresso doesn't show that Quick Sync Video is enabled now and you can't enable hardware encoding as the box isn't available. This means the video card driver doesn't crash any longer.
pcmark7-g620.jpg
pcmark7-g620.jpg (61.79 KiB) Viewed 12314 times
I was also able to get PCMark 7 to run now with the latest driver build as it doesn't get stuck on the first video test now.

Amazing what a driver will do!!

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 9:05 pm
by WindSlash
Thanks for the update and wow, the WEI CPU score went from 7.6 to 6.5?! That's quite the difference for just a video driver update...

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 5:14 pm
by Apoptosis
Cliffro wrote:I would have liked to see some tests with discrete graphics. Since we all know most of the IGP's suck pretty bad. Even the good ones still kinda suck.

Good review none the less.
Cliffro,

Just for you: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1672/15/

Re: Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz CPU Review

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2011 11:07 pm
by shaxs
So if you were building a machine for developing Android applications, i.e. compiling java, would you go with the G620 Sandy Bridge or AMD Athlon II X3 445 Rana. Trying to help a friend decide on a new budget upgrade for his machine.