The Pentium Gold G5600 is a relic from another time. Sure, it has a current-generation feature set and won't fail any of your games or applications, but the competition has clearly caught up. At $94, Intel finds itself unable to compete with the $99 AMD Ryzen 3 2200G in multi-threaded tests. The AMD chip not only gives you four real CPU cores, but also a significantly better integrated graphics solution, which could do wonders for the vast majority of the chip's target audience (who don't use discrete graphics cards).

What the G5600 has going for it is gaming performance because it is one of the most affordable entry options into high-quality PC gaming. We definitely can't recommend pure dual-core CPUs for that scenario as they will cause significant stutter in today's AAA titles. The HyperThreading technology on the G5600 alleviates that by doubling the thread count to four, which is sufficient for today's games. Gaming is the only area where the G5600 is faster than the Ryzen 3 2200G. Games still aren't all that parallelized, and thanks to HyperThreading, this 2-core/4-core chip is able to cope with most games with just 10-15 percent performance lost against processors twice its price. It could bottleneck high-end graphics cards and games with increased eye candy (that relies more on the CPU), so the ideal gaming case for this chip would be Full HD (1080p) resolution with performance-segment graphics cards, such as the GTX 1060 or RX 580, and mid-thru-high settings.

Looking purely at 1080p, we see two distinct classes of games—those which scale well with more cores and those that don't. In games like "Hellblade," which really likes to have four physical cores, the G5600 is among the slower chips. In games like "Wolfenstein II" or "The Witcher 3," there's no perceivable difference between this chip and those double or triple its price.

The G5600's strongest suit are single or dual-threaded applications, like Internet browsing or Office, where its relatively high clock frequency of 3.9 GHz combined with Intel's good IPC rate can make a difference. It does fall behind the Ryzen 2200G in other CPU tests because the AMD chip has two more physical CPU cores and reasonably high clock speeds. Performance takes a beating in multi-threaded tests, such as video encoding, where the extra cores help the 2200G end up almost 33% faster. If you are a budding streamer and starting out on a modest budget, the 2200G is a better bet. The 2200G has a few quirks, such as a narrower PCI-Express 3.0 x8 interface for the main PEG slot, but that doesn't bottleneck performance-segment graphics cards yet. Memory compatibility is generally better on the Intel platform, too, which could factor in positively when considering full platform cost, which is otherwise pretty much identical between the G5600 + H310 and 2200G + B350.

The G5600 faces internal competition from not just slower Pentium Gold models such as the G5500 or G5400 which are up to $20 cheaper, but also previous-generation chips, such as the G4560 that is two-thirds the price while not being much slower. Both paths provide more GHz per dollar at slightly lower maximum performance, though. Choosing the G4560, however, will restrict you to an older platform with limited upgrade headroom, which could be a good thing if you can find a used 100-series motherboard for cheap. This is one area where the Ryzen platform fares better because AMD promised to build processors on the AM4 socket for all the way up to 2020.

Without an unlocked multiplier, there isn't much more performance you can squeeze out of this chip. At best, you can set the base-clock to 102.975 MHz for about 100 MHz more clock speed, but you'll need an expensive Z370 chipset-based motherboard to do that. This is one area where AMD is more humane. You not only get unlocked multipliers, but also CPU overclocking support on inexpensive motherboards based on mid-range B350 or B450 chipsets.

In the end, sub-optimal pricing and a resurgent AMD mean that the Pentium Gold G5600 doesn't stand on solid ground. At $84, this chip could have looked so much better than the competition. At $94, though, you're probably better off choosing the Ryzen 3 2200G for a more wholesome PC, or saving a few dollars by opting for cheaper Pentium Gold models if gaming is all you do. If, however, you can squeeze another $25 into your processor budget, you can get Intel's real quad-core "Coffee Lake" chips, such as the i3-8100, for significantly more future-proofing.