The chaps over at DigitalFoundry have decided to experiment with a new budget CPU in order to find out whether it would be able to deliver a 'console' experience. And to everyone's surprise, a system with a £45 CPU coupled and a £110 GPU is able to pull almost constant 30fps at 1080p and with High settings!

We're not the first to test the G3258 - far from it. We've heard stories of relatively disappointing 4.2GHz overclocks, all the way up to an incredible 4.9GHz. Our chip fell some way between the two at 4.5GHz, and required a slightly worrying 1.35v to get there while remaining stable. Any attempts to move beyond that, even to 4.6GHz, proved a complete waste of time. Overall though, a 'free' boost of 40 per cent in raw clock-speed is not to be sniffed at. We used a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo cooler during our testing, but subsequently found that even the stock heat sink and fan was able to manage the same overclock, though temperatures were rather toasty there at 80 degrees Celsius. However, remember that mileage may vary depending on the chip - something you have no control over when you make your purchase. That's important, bearing in mind that this is a budget processor. A £45 CPU is cheap, but another £20-£30 on a cooler brings you uncomfortably close to Core i3 and AMD FX-6300 territory.

The end results in terms of the raw metrics are expected - the raw clock-speed means you get stunning performance in single-threaded applications, especially with the 4.5GHz overclock in place, but up against the quads, the Pentium is completely annihilated. However, even with that in mind, the G3258 still works out pretty nicely in terms of price vs performance. The i7 sets you back around five times the cost and offers approximately three times the performance. Outside of power-intensive applications, the reality is that most processors spend most of the time in idling or low-power states - in those scenarios, any Haswell CPU offers the same baseline performance as any other.

The question is to what extent the Pentium's power deficit impacts gameplay. In our Digital Foundry PC build, we chose the FX-6300 for two reasons: firstly, modern processors offer an embarrassment of power for gaming applications - do you really need a CPU that can run a game at 200fps when your display only updates 60 times per second? And secondly, the AMD chip's core count mirrors console development. Our bet is still on AMD eventually winning out in the budget CPU market for these reasons, but it's clear that the G3258 is an immensely intriguing proposition. Intel rules with an iron fist in single-thread performance, and the new Pentium offers two cores and the ability to blast beyond beyond the base clocks of all of Intel's enthusiast processors - even the Devil's Canyon i7 4970K.