Intel Pentium G2140 Review

The Pentium G2140 is one of Intel's entry-level Desktop processors. It was released in 2014 with 2 cores and 2 threads. With base clock at 3.3GHz, max speed at 3.3GHz, and a 55W power rating. The Pentium G2140 is based on the Ivy Bridge 22nm family and is part of the Pentium series.

As the higher-priced version of the Pentium G2130, the Pentium G2140 has higher base and Boost frequencies of 3.3 and 3.3 GHz, respectively. That's an increase in base frequency and a bump to boost clocks, but the real advantage should lay in the higher Package Power Tracking (PPT) envelope, which is a measurement of the maximum amount of power delivered to the socket. The Pentium G2130's PPT tops out at 55W, while the motherboard can pump up to 142W to the Pentium G2140 at peak performance. That opens up much more aggressive boost behavior, on both single and multiple cores, that could widen the performance gap beyond what we see on the spec sheet.

So which should you buy? Let's get that out of the way. Before this comparison review we updated our Best CPU feature and we said you should go with the Athlon X4 750K as it comes with a better stock cooler, can be overclocked, and the FM2 platform offers a significantly better upgrade path.

When it comes to gaming it’s fair to say there’s no wrong option here and the Athlon X4 750K and Pentium G2140 are evenly matched. The Pentium G2140 is at times faster thanks to better game support and lower latencies, but the Athlon X4 750K is often able to ensure smoother frame rates thanks to its support for twice as many threads.

If you're mostly playing games on your PC, you will be happy buying either processor. Both proved to be solid options and are evenly matched with a slight advantage to the AMD chip if you don't tune up the Athlon X4 processor. The base performance we showed for the Pentium G2140 can be achieved with $90 memory, while the Athlon X4 750K will require $110 - $120 memory in order to enable the frame rates shown here. It’s not a big cost difference and right now with anything less than an RTX 2070 or Vega 64 you’ll more than likely become GPU limited.

Moving beyond games, it’s an easy win for the Athlon X4 750K. The Athlon X4 upgrade path on A55, A75, A85X motherboards, all support upcoming Piledriver processors. So if you buy a nice A55, A75, A85X board now with the Athlon X4 750K, you’ll be able to slap a Ivy Bridge processor on there later in the year, or whenever you deem it necessary.

One of the nice things about the Intel Pentium G2140 processors is that the retail boxed models come with a CPU cooler. So, you can pick something like the Intel Pentium G2140 up for $73.86 and don’t need to spend any extra money on CPU cooling.

The Intel Pentium G2140 retail boxed processor comes with the traditional ‘pancake’ CPU cooler. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done on this processor which is rated at 55W TDP. You do not need to have an aftermarket cooling solution unless you want to.

If extended overclocking and boost frequencies are trivial matters to you, Intel also offers the Pentium G2130 at $90. It’s still outfitted with 2-cores and 2-threads, but clocks in at a slower 3.2GHz and maxes out at only 3.2GHz.

That said, to squeeze out all the potential of this surprisingly potent entry-level chip, you’ll want (and need) to splurge on an enthusiast-grade Z68, Z75, Z77 motherboard.

Fresh from a successful roll-out of mainstream Pentium CPUs, Intel's attack on AMD now extends down into the entry-level with its Pentium G2140 processors, which the company is making available as of Jan 2014.