Intel Pentium G620

A cheap version of the Sandy Bridge range, the Intel Pentium G620 targets AMD on its favoured terrain, the entry level. Here Intel is aiming to offer a chip that is both rapid and financially accessible.

There's no Turbo Boost or Hyper-Threading in the Intel Pentium range. Both CPU cores are clocked at 2.6 GHz and this clock can't therefore be exceeded during heavy loads.

Performance up

With a performance index of 56, the Pentium G620 is 12% faster than its older generation predecessor, the Pentium G6950, which is however clocked higher (2.8 GHz). In comparison to the AMD solutions, the performance average is slightly down on the best Athlon II X3s (3 cores), but better than the Phenom II X2s with two cores. Obviously cost will be an important factor on purchase.


Note however, the performance index only gives an average. In practice, things are more complex. For example, in spite of having just two cores, the G620 does better than the Athlon II X3 455 (3 cores) in file compression and video gaming. The Phenom II X2 565 (two cores) however sometimes has the advantage, during 3D processing for example.



With respect to power consumption, Intel once again shows that the Sandy Bridges are low consumption chips. At idle we took a reading of 91 Watts for our test machine as a whole. When we pushed the processor hard, we took a reading of 113 Watts. This is a good deal better than the readings of 129 and 166 Watts taken for the Phenom II X2 565 or those of 129 and 170 Watts taken for the Athlon II X3 455.

When using the processor's integrated graphics, these values drop to 42 Watts at idle and 90 Watts in high load.

A graphics solution for office usage

Like all processors in the Sandy Bridge range, this CPU also has integrated graphics. This solution allows you to do without a graphics card for strictly office document use and as long as you have a motherboard with video outs (chipset H67 or Z68 for example). Don't hope to be able to do any gaming however as performance is insufficient. Note also that it won't be able to cope with hardware acceleration for H.264 encoding or video post processing.

Lastly, don't forget that our performance index gives a handy summary of performances for all the processors we've tested.

Power Use	Performance: Applications	Performance: Games

View Performance Index Table