However, keeping overclocking exclusive to the high-end market isn't a good deal especially for gamers and people who want to try out some overclocking for themselves without spending a premium price on the K-series chips. Intel does keep the entry level stack refreshed and updated with new chips during their roadmap cycle for each generation offering lower prices and more efficiency by not giving an unlocked design. The same isn't true anymore, there are some restrictions nowadays on the budget side of things which don't feature unlocked BCLKs and have limited overclock support from motherboard vendors on the cost effective H-Series chipset based solutions. In the past, people could easily purchase a desktop processor off the market shelves, put it in their motherboard's socket, boot it up and overclock the crap out of it (provided you had the OC skills and proper cooling at hand). Since Pentium first arrive till now, the brand positioning and model scheme has evolved over at Intel. Intel has positioned their Devil's Canyon processors at the flagship positioning of the 9-series mainstream performance platform and there are reasons for that while the Pentium series processors will be compatible on both 8-series and 9-series motherboards. Lastly, the Pentium G3258 is a entry level chip unlike its flagship positioning 20 years ago from now.

Secondly, the Pentium G3258 is the '20th Anniversary Edition' processor marking 20 years of Intel's Pentium brand in the industry. The Intel Pentium G3258 we received for testing is first of all based on the Haswell microarchitecture which is the core of Intel's 4th generation processor family (You can find more details on the architecture later in this review). Since the arrival of the first Pentium series processors, things have changed and Intel has drastically evolved into a new beast. The processor we have in our hands today sticks to the Pentium brand which Intel first introduced back in 1993 with their P5 microarchitecture. We all know that Intel is the leader in the silicon industry but all that fame and recognition came from advancements in technology, innovative processor architectures and brands such as the Pentium and Core series.

Intel pentium 4 specifications