Intel Pentium G6950

Product Survey: Processors

With their built-in graphics, they're primarily designed for use with office applications in desktop PCs. As a result, Intel's advanced technologies like Hyper-threading and Turbo mode don't feature. Like the Core i3 500 and i5 600 families, the Pentium G6000s include integrated graphics. Let's be clear about what means: they work as if Intel had included a graphics card directly in the processor itself. To use it, you'll need to have a motherboard that uses the H55 chipset. If yours has the P55 chipset, these graphics capabilities will be completely ignored. Don't expect any kind of 3D performance though: these chipsets aren't designed for gaming and are reserved strictly for running applications. One of the G6950's strengths is its low energy consumption. When idle, our whole test computer, which includes a very power-hungry graphics card, didn't climb above 97 W. That's a good score, and one which was repeated when it started working, with consumption only climbing to 122 W. It's perfect for office use and your electricity bill isn't going to go through the roof. As we mentioned earlier, you can't expect anything out of the ordinary from this chip, but it will be good enough for anybody who doesn't want to play games in 3D and doesn't make regular use of demanding software for editing photos or re-encoding video.