The inauguration of Intel Haswell via the Core i7-4770K brought heavy criticism over the thermal conductivity – Intel has since redeemed themselves with the introduction of Devil’s Canyon. Now whilst G3258 has lower specifications and is dual-core rather than quad-core it will still be worthwhile observing the temperatures to demonstrate how effective G3258’s thermal solution really is.

Temperatures

Having a low TDP, low frequency and low voltage presents us with a very cool Haswell chip indeed. Our processor idled around the 20C mark and the moved up to a mere 40C whilst under strenuous load. This is extremely encouraging and as we’ll see below, will pave the way for a decent overclock.



Overclocking

Since the introduction of Z87 back in 2013, there has been a return to BCLK overclocking. This type of functionality ensures flexibility for Overclockers compared to previous generations where the BCLK was locked to 100MHz and only the ratio could be adjusted. As many of you will know, when the Haswell CPUs hit the scene, reports revealed high temperatures with even small increases in voltage.

G3258 shys away from such weaknesses by remaining significantly cool even though the frequency and voltage is increased considerably.

G3258 overclocks in the same manner as other Haswell chips – the baseclock remains untouched and the multiplier is the feature which is modified. Our best achievement with this chip saw us hit 4.5GHz at 1.45/46 CPU voltage. This voltage may seem rather substantial but there is no cause for concern, the general health and heat emission is fine – in fact the temperatures are surprisingly low.

Hitting 4.5GHz represents a 40% overclock – an impressive achievement indeed. Although we could enter the operating system and perform the stress test, we unfortunately encountered errors when 50 minutes into the task. Applying 4.7GHz and 1.45v allowed us into Windows and we experienced no instability except when applying this significant strain from LinX – so it could very well be useable with these settings but for the purpose of accuracy we had to complete the test at an achievable result.