That's interesting, I made the jump in front of the camera a while ago. Maybe this video triggered a notification, who knows. But yea, more retro content going forward! Welcome back.
RDRAM...now that deserves its own video. Had a 2.6ghz P4 machine with 2GB of RDRAM in it my mom got from her job, it was set up for professional photo editing - even had a wonderful CRT to go with it - The LaCie Electron Blue IV 22.
Remember rdram also costing so much more and then it got phased out which pretty much limited the upgrade path for the family computer as the parents didnt want to spend so much to upgrade.
@@cmelft2463 And that is why RDRAM is still expensive. It was costly back then, so few people bought it. Which means there isn't a big market of used parts.
You know Phil, I was there back in the days of MS-DOS, the IBM 5150, had a 8mhz 286 with VGA as my first IBM compatible PC and had an Amiga 2000 with 3 megs of RAM (!) and a 500 megabyte SCSI HD. OC'd a Celeron 300a to 450 mghz and had a 486 66 dx with a Mediatek Pro Audio Spectrum 16 Pro. Your channel brings back memories of good times. Thank you!
@@philscomputerlab It wasn't until things kind of stalled late in the Pentium 4 era that my enthusiasm kind of waned. I had a Core 2 system and a Phenom x4 that was in use until 2020, but Windows 10 kind of commoditized things after 2015.
I remember getting a Dell tower computer as a replacement for our gateway that had died. It was the family computer when I was a teenager. This must have been around 2004. I was so happy that the Gateway died because it really wasn't a good gaming machine and it also had Windows ME installed, which was a terrible experience. The Dell we ended up getting had a Pentium 4 and an ATI graphics card (I don't remember which model) that my brother and I begged our dad for. It was a nice little gaming machine for the time. We were playing FEAR and Guild Wars in no time.
I have a Pentium4 retro machine from 2002 and upgraded it many times. Spec: Pentium4 2.4 GHz/512KB/400MHz DDR400@333MHz 1GB×2 SiS645 Chipset X1650 Pro 256MB DDR3 Seagate HDD 120GB 48x CD ROM+ 16x DVD ROM 1.44MB FDD WinXP SP3 It is still working and runs nearly all the XP games until 2006 very well. I like it very much and will never sell it just like never selling my childhood either.
My only Pentium 4 was a Socket 478 2,5GHz version. It did not perform very well but it got at least basic PC tasks done until a lightning struck and killed the whole PC 10 years after I got it. Otherwise I probably would still have it as a retro system.
SB Live! is the VW Beatle of soundcards from mid 90s to 2000s. Creative did kill all the competition with the market tsunami of their cards, especially the low budget ones. I find off that socket 478 forked when the new core2 showed up, it would be interesting a board that ranged all s478 cpus. But i think they did the same with 775, soon after.
Hmm well when it comes to gaming and EAX support, you really can't get past Creative cards. With digital out you can do a lot, like go into a nice DAC if you like. Basically be 100% digital and bypass all analogue stuff.
Cool. I just resurrected a p4 1.5ghz and its working great with win98😊 What was that piece of black paper that went onto the cpu? Instead of thermal paste
As a member of the Intel early access (IPLA) program I still have two working engineering samples of the P4 and I still remember the XDC 2000 (Willamette Developer Update) presentation in London where the prototypes and SSE2 was introduced to selected developers. It was the time Intel handed out "Validation platform systems" which basically meant you got a top of the line system with the latest engineering sample CPU. It was a fun time writing SSE2 code, so the P4 was not only part of my live but also part of my work and it was a time I will always gladly remember. Perhaps I should make a video about the prototype P4s? The early ES had an odd of-center die/IHS. Looks really unusual but wont go higher then 1Ghz (its unlocked). The later ES would go up to 1.4 Ghz and looks 'normal'. Is there any interest in this? I could add some coding insides as well.
@@the1990kman Oh I have some other prototypes in my closet as well. I wrote some of the DvD playback software for the Chromatic Research Mpact 1 and 2 cards which where later bought by ATI. Worked with almost every of the first and second gen 3d (de)accelerator cards back in the day, even an NV1 with some hand soldered connections (unfortunately that one is dead).
"LutzLegacyLab" is a new channel where I will show the P4 prototypes and share some insides on the Netburst architecture from a developers POV. There will be some more stuff about the P3, P2 and Pentium MMX I like to share as well.
Your videos are superb Phil. Smooth and relaxing, I usually watch them to get a mix of feelings of gone days but nice memories before going to bed. You are doing a great job honoring the accomplishments of the past with your setups and tests. It makes me remember how I dreamed of those technologies back in the days.
@@philscomputerlab The 1st 5500 FX that you showed - that aluminum cooler - these are chinese "refurbished" cards that have flooded the market in the past 10-ish or so years - seems like their typical salvage shoddy refurbish - mostly likely salvaged mem modules and GPU dies from already cooked video cards that are then baked on a GBA station and work exactly ..... 10 seconds until they fail again.
I found an old IBM thin client with a Pentinum 4 HT (HyperThreading) at a thrift store recently for $20 and I love it. The board supported both IDE and SATA so I was able to use a modern SSD along with a newer DVD drive. Also put an old 8mb ATI Rage XL in it in the only PCI slot. I love this thing! It originally did a fresh install of XP but now I might go to 98SE for the better DOS compatibility
@@philscomputerlab Well, it's also odd that some manufacturers went for a full blown desktop Pentium 4 CPU in some laptops, with the heat and battery life implications that had. Admittedly that might have been only the case with some OEM generic models, like the one I have stored somewhere, and not with major brands.
I have a bunch of these in my basement - I'm waiting for them to get more attention before I rebuild them and put them on eBay ;) - Still, I have sold some IBM ThinkCentres with high end video cards for $500, 5-6 years ago already.
P4s are a great "starter" retro rig. They aren't the best at anything, but they're at least able to run most things and the fact that you can find them for basically free is a huge plus. Ever office building on the planet probably has some old P4 Dells they forgot about in a closet somewhere.
Yeah, the Pentium III and Athlon platforms are sought after and not super cheap, Athlon XP hit the nostalgia of "my old gaming rig", Core 2, K8 and K10 chips are still usable for some modern tasks. But the Pentium 4 has such a bad reputation that nobody wants them, same with the Geforce FX. But with the right expectations, they make for a great, affordable retro setup. A small Northwood and an FX 5200 Ultra are great 98/XP dual boot systems. I wouldn't go for RDRAM, that was expensive and still is, but a Northwood 1.6A and a gig of DDR-400 would make for a neat setup. The 1.6A could easily go to 2.4 GHz if needed and the 2.4C will hit 3.2 GHz just fine. And any chip around 3 GHz will easily get to 4 For flexibility I'd say a model with a small multi and fast FSB would be best. The multi is usually not user-changable, but clocking up or down to reach other speeds is possible.
My first CPU was P4 1.6 GHz Northwood. Such a great CPU. I remember oveclocking it on GA-8IPE1000 at a rock-solid 2.4Ghz with only a minor bump in voltage.
My first PC had a Pentium 4 but it was a later one running at 2.4 GHz. I had it paired with a GeForce 4 Ti4600 and it ran everything I played at the time great. I even played through Half-Life 2 on that system when I first got it and it worked well, although not at the highest detail. I had XP on that system and never tried 98.
Hi Phil, nice to see you again playing and enjoying with your retro machines, back then I only had eyes for AMD, nowadays I don't mind at all about brands I try to enjoy every machine for what it can be.
Had a Pentium III and that thing was amazing, upgraded to an Athlon 2800+ and seeing that against a P4 I stuck with AMD ever since, even FX for god knows how many years (Linux did help it's performance lol), finally Zen dropped, 2600 and now on a 5700x, I'll keep this for a few years as I guess games will hammer the GPU more than CPU in future if Vulkan becomes more adopted... I no longer code so the need for cores is no longer there...
Pentium 4 Northwood models aged better than Prescott cores as they were built on a more efficient node and by the time it was released, dual channel DDR motherboards and chipsets were abundant thus giving people a cheaper option to RDRAM (SDRAM was holding back early Pentium 4 chips). During this time I was on the Socket A platform with the AMD Duron 1.3 GHz (Morgan core) and soon after upgraded to the Athlon XP 1800+ on an nForce 1 platform (which a year later would become an Athlon XP 2500+ OC'd to 3200+ levels on an nForce 2 Ultra platform).
I remember me with my friend got to test P3 Copermine 800MHz and P4 1.3GHz - P4 was a little bit snappier when load was low, but if you wanted to do it "the modern game" (we where in to Ultima Online), so open browser, Ultima and Winamp running at the same time - and that really punished P4 big times, while P3 was just chugging like a king!
I have a socket 423 system with the 1.7GHz P4. Paired it with a Geforce4 Ti 4200 and Vortex2 sound card. It's an excellent DOS/98 PC. I've been using it for the vast majority of my retro games for about 5 years without any issues. I think the motherboard is the Asus P4T.
Back in the day I was a die hard AMD fan, but nowadays I've sort of warmed up to Intel too. I have some spare parts, so maybe it's time to put together a couple of Intel retro rigs as well.
You could totally do the benchmarking of old. See if there are things that have changed and how they scale. That would also hit the retro market quite well.
In 2000 I was still rocking a P3 500mhz and a voodoo 3. I had a P4 2.8ghz and the FX 5600 in 2003. That rig treated me well for years until I upgraded to the Athlon x2 5600 and an 8800GT in 2007. I was super broke in those days and it literally took me years to buy upgrades. I remember complaining about 150$ graphics cards. Seems like a bad joke nowadays. Recently bought a RTX4080 for 1000$. Ugh.
in 2000 , i had a Celeron 1.8 Mhz , 256 of Sdram , a 40 Gb HDD , and i played with an integrated S3 ships on board , a PC bought by my dad (may him rest in peace) at that time , i live in north Africa , Algeria to be precise , at that time and even today , gaming PC is a luxury , to give you an idea , an RTX 4080 cost 16 month of the minimum salary , but since i got a job , i ,embarked into an upgrading road continually (i only skipped the FERMI architecture) , i have an RTX 3070 TI for now , the 4000 series is still too expensive and power hungry and not really worth the upgrade for my knowledge , peace !
Back then I used the family pc. Was lucky to have an athlon xp 2200+ and 256 mb ram on top of a geforce 2 Mx 64 mb. Man those were fun times playing medal of honour allied assault online haha
Yet another brilliant video! I am a Pentium 4 fanatic myself. I was fortunate to have the best P1, P2 and P3 CPUs and yes, I admit that Pentium 4 A and B struggled with the P3 1.4GHz. Yes, in some games and applications the Athlons could have been better. However, my Pentium 4 2.4 GHz (without HT) has never let me down. It is with me since 11 Nov 2002. I still use it 2-3 times a week for a quick retro game. With the AGPx8 Ati Radeon 4650 1GB GPU it is capable to run Civilization 5 with up to 30 fps. DOOM3, Farcry 1, Battlefield 1942 and 2, Flight Simulator X etc. All pre-2006 game run at max details. Yes, P4s are running hot. Yes, they don't have a throttle down feature. However, I love it! I enjoy your channel so much!
Love the video, would be great to do a side by side of this P4 1.4Ghz with the P3 1.4Gz (Tualatin) with the same Video Card and other parts and see how they compare. Personally, I run a P3 1.4Ghz with a Geforce 4 4600 and the Orpheus II. Love the setup, its so flexible, old DOS all the way through the early 2000's all on 98SE.
A 1400 Tualatin can easily keep pace with a 1.6-1.8 GHz Northwood and in some cases even a 2.0-2.4 GHz model. The 1400 Willamette is about as fast as a 1000 Coppermine or 1200 Tualatin Celeron.
The continuity RIMMs were by design due to a rather janky quirk with how Rambus RAM worked. This accounts for why there's a dummy expansion pak on the Nintendo 64 to be filled with an actual expansion pak.
Рік тому+8
I had a Pentium 4 back in the day. It was a 3.8 GHz Prescott model. I had to buy an aftermarket cooler because the one it came with could not keep up when playing "heavy" games (GTA San Andreas was OK, but Oblivion ran poorly). This was also the time of cold cathode lights and case modding. It served me well until I eventually got a Core 2 Duo some years later.
I had to get an aftermarket Zalman cooler for my Prescott, because it gave off so much heat. This was my last intel for years and started to run with the AMD Athlons for years, until Intel got it's game back with the Core i7.
You were lucky I used Prescott till 2013 just for browsing the web & UA-cam,kept it running 24x7 I think that's to blame my mental disorder the immense heat in Arab desert.
@@S9uareHead They never released the 4.0 GHz model, but it was planned. But then, you could just as well do it yourself. Get a 3.0 or 3.2 GHz model and clock it yourself. And since oc goes over the FSB and the architecture really benefits from more bandwith, you'd end up with a faster model than what would be released.
@@frankg.2949 Intel became super competitive in 2006 with their Core 2 chips. Better IPC than Athlon 64 and the ability to clock higher. K10 could keep up, but that time Intel had already released Nehalem. I'd say around 2007-2018 was Intel's great time with unrivaled performance. Only Zen2 was able to catch up and beat them.
Wide availability for basically free is a big plus as well. Athlon XPs were better in pretty much every way at the time, but good luck finding a working cheap one today.
@@PhAyzoN You can find plenty of Athlons XP, but mostly not that higher models and also, later P4 had dual channel which makes some difference. Some decent 3 GHz P4 is perfect platform for Win 98-XP retro gaming build. Ofcourse there is nothing wrong with Athlon XP, but games back in the time were designed for HW which didn't exist yet, so when you want to play some 1999 game on ultra setting in 1280x1024, you need 3 GHz P4, all later AGP GPUs are bottlenecked even by 3GHz P4 so with some Athlon XP for socket 462, it's pointless to install better GPU than like 6600GT and even that will be bottlenecked.
i was thinking about building such a machine . my pc back them used a P2 so its soo dlow even for retro. what kind of gpu and other componebts would I need
Back in the day I had the Pentium 4 1.6A (A = Northwood) oc'ed to 2.2 GHz on a SIS 645 mainboard because Intel had only the expensive i850 with RAMBUS and the not cheap enough but really slow i845 with SDRAM. The i845D was too late for me. In my eyes too many people are badmouthing the P4 in general as being slow and a heatplate. I think mostly because they are mixing up the different P4 cores and some because of hearsay or just to be "cool". Yes the Willamette was slow for the money especially with SDRAM. Northwood was good only the price was high at some point. Prescott was the hot one and at that time Intel was losing more ground to AMD again performance wise. And Cedar Mill was what the Prescott should have been, a die shrink with lower temps etc... But Cedar Mill was too late because the Core 2 Duo was standing at the door.
Minor niggle -- The regular P4 topped out at 3.8 GHz, but the Xeon version went up to 3.93 GHz. I would have expected them to push to 4 GHz just for the bragging rights, but I guess even Intel was sick of the thing by then.
I like the Pentium 4, I grew up with it. My first was a 2Ghz Northwood which was in the family PC for what felt like forever but was probably about 4 or 5 years. It replaced a 350mhz Pentium II. Played so many great games on it with no issues and the performance was really good compared to all my friend's PCs and consoles at the time. I eventually did an in-socket upgrade to a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 around 2006, before building my first PC later that year based on a socket 775 3.4Ghz cedar mill Pentium 4. Thought that was awesome until I upgraded to a Q9650 in 2009; biggest upgrade I've ever done by the way. I now have two Windows XP gaming PCs with Pentium 4 extreme editions. One is a socket 478 3.2Ghz version, the other is a socket 775 3.4Ghz version.
I still have a 3.0 GHz Cedar Mill here, and while it can reach 4 GHz fine, it will get completely destroyed by a single core Conroe Celeron. I have a soft spot for LGA775, the fact that a 3 GHz single core Pentium 4 (or downclocked to 2.4 GHz) can run on the same platform as a 4 GHz Core 2 Quad with about 9 times the performance is just crazy. And overclocking still takes some work. It isn't just more vcore and upping the multi. Everything is done through the FSB, so northbridge clock, memory clock, memory strap, etc are all connected.
@@HappyBeezerStudios I've still got my Cedar Mill 641 that I bought back in 2006. Great CPU, I overclocked it to 5Ghz once, don't think it was stable but it was still mind blowing back then. I have found that the Pentium 4 Gallatin extreme edition is slightly faster in games though so that's why I run it in my retro rig. I learnt on the 775 platform and like you have a soft spot for it. The first 3 PCs that I built were all 775 so it still feels natural to me to do FSB overclocking. I didn't upgrade to anything else until 2014 when I got a 4690k.
I do remember my parents own pc back then. It has Pentium 4 1.4GHz (used socket 423 with RDRAM) and ATI Radeon 9250 AGP. Altho I'm only played some MMORPG games like Wow but never tried other 3d games before.
The P4 is a perfect example of when Intel allowed their marketing department to fully drive the engineering. The goal was sky high clock speeds at all costs, hence the super deep pipeline and other design decisions. It's a CPU line that it easily overlooked these days in large part because the chips that came before and after it from both AMD and Intel were so much better in many ways. For me the P4 generation is when I went over to AMD for a while. I had been with Intel through the Slot 1 and Socket 370 gens after spending the entire Socket 7 generation with AMD chips. Then in 2001 I attended a pop-up AMD Roadshow event in Chicago IL at the launch of the Athlon XP line and won a MSI motherboard and Athlon XP 1800+ CPU which at the time was their fastest chip. So I stuck with AMD through the Athlon XP days. Later on I had a Barton core Athlon XP 2500+ CPU that I had overclocked to 3200+ speeds which served me well until the time when the later Core 2 and AM2 based Athlons were common. I did end up using a lot of P4 based machines at work though (I was an IT contractor for the US Army then) and quite a few of them were dog slow, especially when they got hot and thermal throttled. A P4 was fairly well behaved in a stable temperature environment, but put one in a warehouse or factory setting and boy were they a pain! I was so glad when the Core 2 based machines came in to replace them.
At that time Intel didn't know P4 wouldn't scale that well in terms of frequency and that it would encounter major headwind in the form of TDP. AMD was worse. It knew about the problems of P4 but still decided to release Bulldozer.
@@Alex-df4lt NetBurst, Bulldozer, POWER6, all designs aimed to go to super high clocks, replaced by lower clocking, high IPC designs, that managed to reach the same actual clocks. Yes, in 2007, just when Intel went away from their GHz race, IBM decided to release 5 GHz CPUs. And not only that, POWER6 was in-order.
your FX 5500 seems to have 3 swollen capacitors on it, replace them and it will probably work fine again, hell replace all 6, even the other 3 that look fine probably no longer have their original capacity
Still running a P4-2.8HT with 1GB ram and a SSD caddy so I can (drive swap) run DOS, win98, winXP and even Vista on it. It has 2x voodoo2 cards, ATI 9800, SBlive!.. Works great for all my retro gaming needs from mid 90's to mid 2000's. Cheers!
I was using a Pentium 4 670 model until spring 2012 as my daily driver. It only struggled with video over 720p but other than that it still performed fine. Obviously gaming would be another story.
Thank you for the new format Phil. Artention to detail is always a BIG+. I can't believe you actually owned a P4 back in the day. I owned an AMD Athlon setup initially with a Duron 600 and eventually an Athlon 1400. That build lasted until my Intel Core second gen build- you must have been REALLY well off to go Pentium 4 at a time when it cost like 4x more and consistently lost to AMD... not that it is bad to be wealthy but P4 was really flexing financial muscle back in the day.
It was a Pentium 4 2.6 with DDR. So it was much later and competition was strong between Intel and AMD. PCs were not expensive at the time, it was very competitive with new things coming out all the time!
Willamette was sort of a proof of concept. Completely inferior to Tualatin, but functional. Northwood was the height of the architecture. Massive increases in clocks (and thus performance) and unbeatable (at the time) in some tasks. Prescott lenghened the pipeline, reduced IPC but couldn't balance that out with even higher clocks. It was pretty much unable to do what it was designed for. Cedar Mill was pretty much just a shrink of Prescott, but fixed the power draw and is a decent ship. Pretty much what Prescott should've been from the start.
At the time I did almost went to the Pentium 4 route. And in fact I did get the P4 motherboard, but with Asus CT-479 adapter and with a Pentium M socket 479 mobile chip. It was mostly faster than any of the Pentium 4 chips. I first had it with Pentium M 755 and later upgraded it to the Pentium M 780. The graphics card what I used came from Gainward 7800GS+ Golden sample 512MB. It was actually a 7900GT but in AGP! I still have that computer and use it when I feel like playing some retro games.
Sad story time. Around the time Prince of Persia was being promoted by intel, i asked for a p4 upgrade our home pc. My dad told me it was expensive and I should have it done professionally. I assured him it was fine, "i got this". My birthday rolled around so did the p4 with hyperthreading. I ripped appart the pc and popped in the new cpu and slapped the cooler back on ...to no post situation. I had bent a few pins... No biggie. Just grab an exacto knife and... I had a row of bent pins. Okay slight panic but fixible ... A row of bent pins and 3 had broken off..... So i did the best thing i could... and hid the broken brand new cpu... Put the pc back together without reapplying new thermal paste and hope it still runs.... And it did! Err. Well it walked. It was throttling like crazy with worse perfmance than ever before. "Hows that new processor?" 😃 "It's great dad. It does so many good things." 😶 (😭) Dad lives the rest of his life happy with himself and impressed with me. I live in shame, never talking about it again. I got into pc gaming in 2013 and wow. I know how bad i messed up. Never got to tell my dad in the end. I miss him. Biggest ooof .... 😩
I wanted an Athlon XP for my Windows 98 machine but I'm having no luck with the motherboards. Since I have several P4 machines I went with a P4 2.66Ghz on an Asus P4S8X-X, GeForce FX 5600 128MB and Sound Blaster Live SB0060, so my current setup is very similar to the one you tested, except for DDR instead of RDRAM, 2 real IDEs with 80GB and 320GB, and dual booting Win98 and Win2000 on the same partition 🙂
I've bought a lot of sc 462 motherboards in last few months for few bucks here in Czech Republic, not always in great condition, but it always worked. I can't imagine living in country where you have only eBay with their crazy prices, those worldwide sellers are totaly crazy. Sometimes it's enough to just visit some local computer store and ask if they have some "old trash" and very often they have and they are happy that you will take it for free. 🙂
Makes me wonder why Windows 2000. Might be just for period correctness, but there isn't anything that 2000 does that XP can't do either, but with support for some newer software. Yes, it means going to "classic" layout, but should do fine. On my 933 MHz Pentium 3 build I'M running 98 SE and XP on 256 MB RAM and XP is just fine. In fact, with my CRT it feels snappier than my modern machine with modern parts.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Wrong, I thought that XP is just reskined 2000 for a long time, but even when core is almost the same, there is massive difference in compatibility with old games and software. Win 2000 has advantages of NT, it knows NTFS file system, it's stable, it knows USB 2.0 AND compatibility with Win 9x games is much better than in XP for some reason. Try for example AvP1 or NFS 5, both games are bugged in XP, but work totaly fine in 2000. Ofcourse you can use Win 98 or ME, but 2000 has drivers for HW to like 2005, so you can build superior computer for these late Win 9x games. Test it, I am not kidding, compatibility in Win 2000 with old games is much better and it's better to play DOS games in DOS box now, so I don't really need actual Win 9x based OS.
@@HappyBeezerStudios The explanation is very simple. I have 3 retro machines, the older one runs Win3+1+Win95+NT4 (3Dfx games), the 2nd one runs Win98SE+Win2K, the 3rd one runs WinXP+Win7 (DX9 and above). Basically for nostalgia since I've used all these OSes extensively over the years, also because dual/triple booting requires less physical machines 🙂
That's a really awesome project I'm actually thinking of going with a P4 (S478) for my retro 98 machine for some old Star Trek Games for the more authentic feel tbh! :3 My first proper PC was the AthlonXP which ran 98 and XP very very well, I have an ATI HD 3650 512MB AGP that I'm looking to use as the old Catalyst drivers I remember worked wonderfully for the games I played back in the day :)
You was very lucky if that HD3650 AGP worked without problems, these late ATI GPUs for AGP slots were very problematical. I have one HD4650 now and in some MBs it doesn't even give you image (some socket 462 MBs), I had even problem in sc754 MB, it kind of worked, but there were some problems. Only platform where it works without any issues are late sc 478 MBs, so Pentium 4 plaftorm.
Had a 3.2ghz northwood in back in the day the performance felt good for the time and it never gave me any problems. Also currently have a 3.15ghz northwood paired with a Voodoo 5500.
Pentium 4 is very underrated. They are cheap, plenty available and very reliable. Athlon XP are dying from lack of IHS and many cracks on the die from bigger coolers.
Interesting Video. I did not know that the early P4 had such a bad reputation back then. My first gaming pc with a CPU in the GHz range was a Pentium 4, 1,5 GHz with intel 850gbc mainboard and Asus v7100 as a graphics card and I was blown away. But I was coming from P2 266 MHz system so this was not hard. I do not have the system anymore but I will go back into Windows 98 gaming again and want to make super high end system I could never afford back then.
Pentium 4 was a marketing child. Who could say no do commercials going on about the "2.4 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor", when the closest Athlon had 1.8 GHz.
The first computer I built for myself out of parts was a P4. The capacitor plague took it before its 4th birthday, but I will always have some nostalgia for these hot beasts.
Its insane. I used this EXACT same setup until 2013 (was the family computer). I overclocked the P4 to 1.6ghz (i had no idea what i was doing) and somehow burnt out my fx 5200 at some point trying to swap it into something else. It was a horrible machine but it gave me my love for older computers and introduced me to loads of older games (such as system shock 2!). Still have the computer today. Super cool video.
Happy Friday Phil! I love the Pentium 4 platform. I just built a P4 system as a WinXP gaming rig. It uses an nForce chipset but works grand under XP. I do have a couple Dell socket 478 builds as well that dual boot 98 and XP, and they run perfectly including dual channel DDR 400 ram. I do have one socket 423 board that uses Rambus, but it’s a little finicky so I never used it in a full build. Thanks for sharing Phil!
I don't like nForce chipsets, I always had problems with that. For socket 478 boards, I prefer Intel 865 chipsets, it supports prescott and DDR400 and it's reliable, no problems with late AGP cards etc....
Intel was in Fry's electronics demo'ing the new 1.4ghz system with Quake 3. Was so impressed I plopped down my credit card and got the motherboard/cpu/ram combo. Prior to my P4, upgrades were almost yearly. I think I managed to keep mine running up until 2006 or so, when the first Core2Duo's came out. My system at the time was pretty speedy. I had an Adaptec SCSI controller, a 15k RPM drive. I clutched onto my Glide graphics as long as I could.
I was putting a new machine together from scratch in early 2002, and the Pentium 4 1.7GHz was the current one at the time if I remember correctly, but I chose to go with a Celeron 1200 Tualatin CPU, due to people saying the Pentium was still being out performed by the Pentium III. The gap between the PIII and Celeron model was not massive at the time, so I saved some money instead.
My first computer had Pentium 4 that was almost 20 years ago. It was the era of Windows XP. Back then 512mb can make your computer so fast. Fun fact: I still have the original computer case.
I found duron 1.3GHz with a 6200 turbo cache in a skip, i tried an athlon 2100+ and it worked and then a 2700+ which worked as well, along with a 9800 Pro card. Runs 98 SE perfectly. It's damn fast, stupid overkilll. Has an ISA slot too, i put an awe64 value in and works in native dos.
At that time I didn't have a Pentium 4, but always Athlon systems. Since the platform has largely passed me by, I put together some from all generations of Socket 423, 478 and 775 in my Retro PC collection today. I even have a PC with Socket 604 and 2x Xeon 3.6 GHz HT processors with 8 Gb DDR Ram from 2003. It manages 14000 points with 1280 x 1024, 32 bit and triple buffering in 3dmark 01. As a graphics card, however, I use a much newer Radeon R7 250 with 2 GB because it still works under XP. The 775 system is a Dell Dimension 5000 with GTX 750 upgraded. The 478 system is a 3.2Ghz HT P4 with Radeon 1950 Pro And the 423 system has 1.7 Ghz and a Geforce 3 Ti 200
The Athlon was kind of the enthusiast's choice, put the p4 always just worked. I liked the stability and the compatibility, less drivers issues on intel.
That's exactly what I am saying for almost 20 years, I never liked that AMD fanatic army. Yes, Athlon XP was more energy efficient, but it was not THAT good as they were saying and CPU alone is not everything, you neeed to look even at motherboards and sc 462 motherboards were so outdated, you still had to set FSB manualy, so some people had just basic CPU frequency because they didn't know what to do with that, it still didn't have dual channel and compatibility with late AGP cards was pretty bad. Some later sc 462 MBs didn't even have USB keyboard option in bios and I remember USB keyboards were already pretty common in like 2003, Intel MBs supported this already on most of socket 370 boards. Ofcourse USB keyboard worked in bios and on post screen, but it didn't work on "press any key to continue" screen while installing Windows. 🙂 But if you like sado-maso, then sc462 is a perfect platform for you. Some late decent sc 478 MB is the best platform for superiour Win 9x retro gaming computer.
For the energy-conscious among you I would suggest getting an AMD Geode NX 1750. It is basically just an Athlon XP running with very low voltage. The NX 1750 for example runs at 1.4 GHz, 1.25V and a max TDP of 25W. There's even lower voltage models but you won't find many mainboards that support such low voltages (as low as 1.0V). So beforehand make sure the mainboards supports low voltages otherwise it will run with something like 1.45V or higher. I use an ASRock K7S41GX with my NX 1750. If you even use the onboard GPU and no dedicated graphics I think you can get some impressive energy-efficiency out of such a system. Phil also has a video on the Geode NX 1750, you might want to check it out.
I remember messing with a P4 1.4 GHZ with RAMbus memory back in 2001. Was a headache to it to work get properly allround. Compared to a "just" 1 GHz PIII or the Athlon T-Bird, which was totally stable and at least as fast for gaming - even just using SDR memory. I'm guessing The RAMbus / mainboard chipset must have had compatibility issues. But the P4 paired with DDR memory I always found stable.
The 1.4 - 1.5 - 1.6 GHz P4 models (i think there was a 1.3 GHz sku as well?) were pretty abysmal, performance and thermal wise. Basically a high-clock P3 was better, not to mention AMD's impressive Athlon XP CPUs. Still, Intel sold a huge number of them because they came with every new OEM pc ("Intel Inside" was a huge marketing gimmick at the time). You could only get AMD if you made the computer yourself, at least where I lived.
Never had a 423 or 478 P4. I used a Socket 370 Pentium 3 866Mhz (overclocked, 6.5 multiplier at 155Mhz FSB was 1.04 GHz). I used that machine well beyond it being obsolete but being in my early 20s...gaming wasn't a big concern.
P4 3.2 clocked to 4.0, 7950 GT, 4 gigs of Corsair Ram, Asus board, don't remember the chipset right now, and a couple of highspeed drives in raid... Good times. Still have a few old P4 machines laying around. Creative sound card with Z5500 speakers... liked my old P4 computers. I have an old 3.4 extreme edition, that would only run 3.6, and a 7800GS Golden Sample with the unauthorized 7950's chipset. This video makes me want to play around with that old hardware.
In a vacuum the Pentium 4 is okay, but I too, had a Pentium 4 (2.6GHz HT) and felt really burnt by the computer shop that built my system and convince Mum and I that it was superior to AMD. A year later after issues with the motherboard they specced and other things, I built my own system, this time I went with an AMD 3500+, 6800 Ultra and Creative Audigy. It was significantly better in every way. I stayed with AMD up until 2011 when they really fell behind with Bulldozer. Now I'm rocking Ryzen. Their rise from near death has been truly remarkable to watch, especially from someone who has been fond of them as the underdogs (financially and size)
P4 1.6 Ghz Willamette AGP 4X ECS Elitegroup MB/ SiS chipset .Learned how to download chipset drivers from manufacturers website didn't realize they worked better than generic windows drivers. Went with the onboard graphics for a long time then got a GeForce2 MX 200 32Mb 😆
im in the camp of not liking the P4, but thats because i actually had them back then and i remember my P4 478 northwood at 2.8GHz were shit comapred to my friends Athlon 64 3200+which didn't have hyper threading, less ram on the system and 2GHz base clock(slight bump to 2.2GHz if memory serves) :D I was like, im gonna do one better and changed out the board to a 775 asus(wtih a VIA chipset and AGP slot for my 6600GT) and the cpu was a pentium D 830, which i manged to get to 3.6Ghz with a giant tower cooler from some chinese brand with two fans. then i finally had the faster pc :D and a year or two later he got an E6600 and i was beat once again until i got a new one, it was a fun rivalary :D
I currently run a Pentium 4 in my Win98 machine, albeit a faster clock with a Radeon 9800 currently. Its a great system and I've been really happy with the performance from it. admittedly I am also running a nicer Zalman cooler on it too however :) I dont have any GLQuake benchmarks unfortunately, but I did find the Radeon 9250 was very GPU limited on a lot of my benchmarks (Quake 2, 3, Unreal Gold, Unreal Torunament, andUnreal Tournament 2004), showing no difference in benchmark from a 1.6 Ghz all the way up to 3Ghz, whereas the Radeon 9800 showed vast improvements as clocks increased and still more again when overclocked. The top end gpus of the time definitely have some more headroom to play with thats for sure.
Willamette was my first processor. I was pissed with how slow it was compared to my old 566MHz Pentium 3 that I OCed to 800+MHz. I also hated how my Willamette board used RD-RAM (rambus) which was expensive as heck. Jumped to Northwood, then to Prescott, and quickly to Wolfdale (E2160). The E2160 was a godsend!
I had a Pentium 4 once, but it was actually an emergency computer I bought for £5. It was 2013/14, my old 2.6gHz Athlon64 x2 broke down and I needed a computer for work reasons, but I had almost no money whatsoever. It come with Windows XP installed and was painfully slow. I taken it to recycling with glee when I finally managed to find a cheap used Core 2 Quad about 5 months later. I kinda wish I knew then what I did now, but hindsight is always 20/20.
To tell you the truth I was a red team guy all the way! AMD an ATI, my very own firts pc was a celeron 2.46 ghz and 128 kb l2 cache, I thought that the older pentium 3 family pc was faster. I was so naive back in those days, I made the worst combo ever, a nvidia fx5200 and that celery ha! But later that year I got a athlon 64 3200+ socket 939 with an amd x200 chipset and an ATI x800xl. A world of performance difference! Forgot to add that I was running windows XP
That Geforce FX5500: Looks like the capacitor top left is swollen. Might be a bad angle, but normally that caused the glitching and instability. This bring back so many memories! We had a 1.7 Pentium 4 on Intel Desktop Board. Once I replaced all the caps on a glitching motherboard with onboard graphics. It actually worked, and the PC was usable again.
Yes, Willamette likely got dumped on for using a T-bird-like 1.75V, while not performing better than a T-bird 800 or 900 in many cases. Northwood was very good, but one I was testing was at 45C idle and I've been told that they were cool chips, IIRC.
To me, Pentium 4 shine with the Northwood core. Socket 478, 3.2Ghz with HT and FSB 800. This was a solid processor back in the day. But i went AMD side with AXP 3200+ because it was cheaper and perform about the same.
Great video Phil! Format was great and thanks for running through those games. I picked up a brand new Asus P4B (478) and paired it with a 1.8ghz P4 running 98. I've also got P4 650HT running xp, and some spare P4 630's. It's always fun playing with P4 machines!
My first P4 was a 2.66 Ghz single core, non HT model. 533 Mhz front side bus. Those maxed out at the 3.06 Ghz and it HAD HT. The only chip in the line that did. Mine did not of course. The board I got with it was standard socket 478, no name. 2 Memory slots. Really cheap made board I got at a Taiwanese trade show that happens yearly in NY. It was good for what it was. It wasn't as fast as the Athlon XP 2 Ghz I had but it was really close in most ways except in gaming. Where the Athlon got more frames. So I used it as my HTPC and let the kids watch movies on it. Also used it before I went to bed to watch shows. Good times. My children were all home and were all so young. They are all in or out of college already. Time goes so fast.
I was an early adopter, with a 1.5GHz Willamette P4 on socket 423. It was not great and there were many regrets. Especially since socket 423 was a dead end.
i didn't realize till now that rambus memory was in anything past socket 423 , i have an asus P4T i snatched from ebay 5-6 years ago for $16 shipped which is the socket 423 with rambus memory , it came with the 1.7ghz pentium 4 which i believe was the best one on the platform
Some people in Latin America called it the Lentium 4 (Len as in Lento=slow). Never had a bad experience. the other systems I used back then were one with a Celeron 700 MHz and a 900Mhz board soldered Duron.
lol I had one of these CPUs and held onto it for far too long, my next one was an i5-2500K. I remember later benchmarking a Raspberry Pi and finding it was about equal with the P4 but obviously used a mere fraction of the power.
P4 the biggest failure intel ever had was building thousands system builds back then while amd crashed intel from 2000 to 2007 in every way around back then from first 64bit and intel had to buy out the technology for future generations to and first dual cores amd p4 was well known to be a good griller to cook specially prescott something intel slowly recovered then by 2007 into core 2 something similar going on now with intel again using old 6 year architectures pumping them just with new futures to catch up with amd but it cant since 2006 intel is gone maybe they will better recover by 2025 when they build ther new fabs and better nm
Much better choice than a 1.4ghz p4 would be a pentium 3, better performance and less temperature. Ther Architecture of P4 was not good, with core2duo they continued the P3 Architecture.
First time I am seeing Phil's face and wow he does not look like I imagined. He looks like a tough German football hooligan, not a retro PC nerd. 😄
Yes, we nerds, are dangerous 😂
Sounded like a chinaman to me ha
That's interesting, I made the jump in front of the camera a while ago. Maybe this video triggered a notification, who knows. But yea, more retro content going forward! Welcome back.
@@philscomputerlab same here. Been busy with life i somehow forgot about this amazing channel
Bit harsh? 😄
RDRAM...now that deserves its own video. Had a 2.6ghz P4 machine with 2GB of RDRAM in it my mom got from her job, it was set up for professional photo editing - even had a wonderful CRT to go with it - The LaCie Electron Blue IV 22.
Remember rdram also costing so much more and then it got phased out which pretty much limited the upgrade path for the family computer as the parents didnt want to spend so much to upgrade.
@@cmelft2463 And that is why RDRAM is still expensive. It was costly back then, so few people bought it. Which means there isn't a big market of used parts.
You know Phil, I was there back in the days of MS-DOS, the IBM 5150, had a 8mhz 286 with VGA as my first IBM compatible PC and had an Amiga 2000 with 3 megs of RAM (!) and a 500 megabyte SCSI HD. OC'd a Celeron 300a to 450 mghz and had a 486 66 dx with a Mediatek Pro Audio Spectrum 16 Pro. Your channel brings back memories of good times. Thank you!
What was your favourite PC or era?
@@philscomputerlab It wasn't until things kind of stalled late in the Pentium 4 era that my enthusiasm kind of waned. I had a Core 2 system and a Phenom x4 that was in use until 2020, but Windows 10 kind of commoditized things after 2015.
Ever honest Phil... 10:58 "There's lots of dialogue going on with cheesy lines...and umm, yeah!"... Love it!
I remember getting a Dell tower computer as a replacement for our gateway that had died. It was the family computer when I was a teenager. This must have been around 2004. I was so happy that the Gateway died because it really wasn't a good gaming machine and it also had Windows ME installed, which was a terrible experience.
The Dell we ended up getting had a Pentium 4 and an ATI graphics card (I don't remember which model) that my brother and I begged our dad for. It was a nice little gaming machine for the time. We were playing FEAR and Guild Wars in no time.
I have a Pentium4 retro machine from 2002 and upgraded it many times.
Spec:
Pentium4 2.4 GHz/512KB/400MHz
DDR400@333MHz 1GB×2
SiS645 Chipset
X1650 Pro 256MB DDR3
Seagate HDD 120GB
48x CD ROM+ 16x DVD ROM
1.44MB FDD
WinXP SP3
It is still working and runs nearly all the XP games until 2006 very well.
I like it very much and will never sell it just like never selling my childhood either.
The first machine I played Warcraft III and WoW on was a Dell with P4. Good memories.
_Shogo_ ! I still have it on disc somewhere. Bought it when it was new, back in '99 I think …
Can't wait to play more. I need to start copying the saved games for the next video, sort of like slowly progressing through the games...
My only Pentium 4 was a Socket 478 2,5GHz version. It did not perform very well but it got at least basic PC tasks done until a lightning struck and killed the whole PC 10 years after I got it. Otherwise I probably would still have it as a retro system.
SB Live! is the VW Beatle of soundcards from mid 90s to 2000s.
Creative did kill all the competition with the market tsunami of their cards, especially the low budget ones.
I find off that socket 478 forked when the new core2 showed up, it would be interesting a board that ranged all s478 cpus. But i think they did the same with 775, soon after.
Hmm well when it comes to gaming and EAX support, you really can't get past Creative cards. With digital out you can do a lot, like go into a nice DAC if you like. Basically be 100% digital and bypass all analogue stuff.
Yeah, the early Pentium 4 wasn't that bad as many people thinking. =)
Cool. I just resurrected a p4 1.5ghz and its working great with win98😊
What was that piece of black paper that went onto the cpu? Instead of thermal paste
Yes many years ago I stopped using paste and use thermal pads. It has made life easy and less messy as I build a new system all the time.
I found a Via PCChips with the exact same CPU in storage. Love the Pentium 4 fond on the chip. Very classy. Later models didnt have it. 💾🤗👽
As a member of the Intel early access (IPLA) program I still have two working engineering samples of the P4 and I still remember the XDC 2000 (Willamette Developer Update) presentation in London where the prototypes and SSE2 was introduced to selected developers. It was the time Intel handed out "Validation platform systems" which basically meant you got a top of the line system with the latest engineering sample CPU. It was a fun time writing SSE2 code, so the P4 was not only part of my live but also part of my work and it was a time I will always gladly remember. Perhaps I should make a video about the prototype P4s? The early ES had an odd of-center die/IHS. Looks really unusual but wont go higher then 1Ghz (its unlocked). The later ES would go up to 1.4 Ghz and looks 'normal'. Is there any interest in this? I could add some coding insides as well.
I say give it a go. Linus made a video about the prototype Voodoo 5 6000 gpu, so I think even a Pentium 4 prototype will be interesting to someone.
@@the1990kman Oh I have some other prototypes in my closet as well. I wrote some of the DvD playback software for the Chromatic Research Mpact 1 and 2 cards which where later bought by ATI. Worked with almost every of the first and second gen 3d (de)accelerator cards back in the day, even an NV1 with some hand soldered connections (unfortunately that one is dead).
@@lutzgrosshennig Very nice!
i'd kill to see those prototype units!!!
"LutzLegacyLab" is a new channel where I will show the P4 prototypes and share some insides on the Netburst architecture from a developers POV. There will be some more stuff about the P3, P2 and Pentium MMX I like to share as well.
Your videos are superb Phil. Smooth and relaxing, I usually watch them to get a mix of feelings of gone days but nice memories before going to bed. You are doing a great job honoring the accomplishments of the past with your setups and tests. It makes me remember how I dreamed of those technologies back in the days.
Thank you!
@@philscomputerlab The 1st 5500 FX that you showed - that aluminum cooler - these are chinese "refurbished" cards that have flooded the market in the past 10-ish or so years - seems like their typical salvage shoddy refurbish - mostly likely salvaged mem modules and GPU dies from already cooked video cards that are then baked on a GBA station and work exactly ..... 10 seconds until they fail again.
I found an old IBM thin client with a Pentinum 4 HT (HyperThreading) at a thrift store recently for $20 and I love it. The board supported both IDE and SATA so I was able to use a modern SSD along with a newer DVD drive. Also put an old 8mb ATI Rage XL in it in the only PCI slot. I love this thing! It originally did a fresh install of XP but now I might go to 98SE for the better DOS compatibility
That's a keeper! Usually thin clients have low powered VIA or AMD chips. Very interesting they went with a Pentium 4 HT.
@@philscomputerlab Well, it's also odd that some manufacturers went for a full blown desktop Pentium 4 CPU in some laptops, with the heat and battery life implications that had. Admittedly that might have been only the case with some OEM generic models, like the one I have stored somewhere, and not with major brands.
Antix
I have a bunch of these in my basement - I'm waiting for them to get more attention before I rebuild them and put them on eBay ;) - Still, I have sold some IBM ThinkCentres with high end video cards for $500, 5-6 years ago already.
P4s are a great "starter" retro rig. They aren't the best at anything, but they're at least able to run most things and the fact that you can find them for basically free is a huge plus. Ever office building on the planet probably has some old P4 Dells they forgot about in a closet somewhere.
I have about 30 somewhere lol.
You can't install a V5 or a V4 or a 3500, though. P3 BX is still the best but expensive choice.
Yeah, the Pentium III and Athlon platforms are sought after and not super cheap, Athlon XP hit the nostalgia of "my old gaming rig", Core 2, K8 and K10 chips are still usable for some modern tasks.
But the Pentium 4 has such a bad reputation that nobody wants them, same with the Geforce FX. But with the right expectations, they make for a great, affordable retro setup. A small Northwood and an FX 5200 Ultra are great 98/XP dual boot systems. I wouldn't go for RDRAM, that was expensive and still is, but a Northwood 1.6A and a gig of DDR-400 would make for a neat setup.
The 1.6A could easily go to 2.4 GHz if needed and the 2.4C will hit 3.2 GHz just fine. And any chip around 3 GHz will easily get to 4
For flexibility I'd say a model with a small multi and fast FSB would be best. The multi is usually not user-changable, but clocking up or down to reach other speeds is possible.
My first CPU was P4 1.6 GHz Northwood. Such a great CPU. I remember oveclocking it on GA-8IPE1000 at a rock-solid 2.4Ghz with only a minor bump in voltage.
Yes, all P4s from 1.6 up to 2.2 can run at 2.4 with the stock cooler.
My first PC had a Pentium 4 but it was a later one running at 2.4 GHz. I had it paired with a GeForce 4 Ti4600 and it ran everything I played at the time great. I even played through Half-Life 2 on that system when I first got it and it worked well, although not at the highest detail. I had XP on that system and never tried 98.
Hi Phil, nice to see you again playing and enjoying with your retro machines, back then I only had eyes for AMD, nowadays I don't mind at all about brands I try to enjoy every machine for what it can be.
I'm sure to do AMD stuff soon :D
Had a Pentium III and that thing was amazing, upgraded to an Athlon 2800+ and seeing that against a P4 I stuck with AMD ever since, even FX for god knows how many years (Linux did help it's performance lol), finally Zen dropped, 2600 and now on a 5700x, I'll keep this for a few years as I guess games will hammer the GPU more than CPU in future if Vulkan becomes more adopted... I no longer code so the need for cores is no longer there...
Pentium 4 Northwood models aged better than Prescott cores as they were built on a more efficient node and by the time it was released, dual channel DDR motherboards and chipsets were abundant thus giving people a cheaper option to RDRAM (SDRAM was holding back early Pentium 4 chips). During this time I was on the Socket A platform with the AMD Duron 1.3 GHz (Morgan core) and soon after upgraded to the Athlon XP 1800+ on an nForce 1 platform (which a year later would become an Athlon XP 2500+ OC'd to 3200+ levels on an nForce 2 Ultra platform).
Prescotts longer pipeline with goals for 7 GHz never lived up to it's tasks.
I loved the Pentium 4, but I still prefer my Pentium 3. The new format is great too, Phil! Thank you!
I remember me with my friend got to test P3 Copermine 800MHz and P4 1.3GHz - P4 was a little bit snappier when load was low, but if you wanted to do it "the modern game" (we where in to Ultima Online), so open browser, Ultima and Winamp running at the same time - and that really punished P4 big times, while P3 was just chugging like a king!
I have a socket 423 system with the 1.7GHz P4. Paired it with a Geforce4 Ti 4200 and Vortex2 sound card. It's an excellent DOS/98 PC. I've been using it for the vast majority of my retro games for about 5 years without any issues. I think the motherboard is the Asus P4T.
Back in the day I was a die hard AMD fan, but nowadays I've sort of warmed up to Intel too. I have some spare parts, so maybe it's time to put together a couple of Intel retro rigs as well.
You could totally do the benchmarking of old. See if there are things that have changed and how they scale. That would also hit the retro market quite well.
In 2000 I was still rocking a P3 500mhz and a voodoo 3. I had a P4 2.8ghz and the FX 5600 in 2003. That rig treated me well for years until I upgraded to the Athlon x2 5600 and an 8800GT in 2007. I was super broke in those days and it literally took me years to buy upgrades. I remember complaining about 150$ graphics cards. Seems like a bad joke nowadays. Recently bought a RTX4080 for 1000$. Ugh.
in 2000 , i had a Celeron 1.8 Mhz , 256 of Sdram , a 40 Gb HDD , and i played with an integrated S3 ships on board , a PC bought by my dad (may him rest in peace) at that time , i live in north Africa , Algeria to be precise , at that time and even today , gaming PC is a luxury , to give you an idea , an RTX 4080 cost 16 month of the minimum salary , but since i got a job , i ,embarked into an upgrading road continually (i only skipped the FERMI architecture) , i have an RTX 3070 TI for now , the 4000 series is still too expensive and power hungry and not really worth the upgrade for my knowledge , peace !
Back then I used the family pc. Was lucky to have an athlon xp 2200+ and 256 mb ram on top of a geforce 2 Mx 64 mb. Man those were fun times playing medal of honour allied assault online haha
@@liveyourdreammedia the Good Old Days ! gives you a PC Veterant kind of feeling !
Yeah... 150-300$ graphics card looked extremely expensive. Now you can go and buy everything better, but if only you have $1000 and more 🤣🤣🤣
@@offlinegamer6756 love your name btw
Yet another brilliant video! I am a Pentium 4 fanatic myself. I was fortunate to have the best P1, P2 and P3 CPUs and yes, I admit that Pentium 4 A and B struggled with the P3 1.4GHz. Yes, in some games and applications the Athlons could have been better. However, my Pentium 4 2.4 GHz (without HT) has never let me down. It is with me since 11 Nov 2002. I still use it 2-3 times a week for a quick retro game. With the AGPx8 Ati Radeon 4650 1GB GPU it is capable to run Civilization 5 with up to 30 fps. DOOM3, Farcry 1, Battlefield 1942 and 2, Flight Simulator X etc. All pre-2006 game run at max details. Yes, P4s are running hot. Yes, they don't have a throttle down feature. However, I love it! I enjoy your channel so much!
Awesome 😎
Love the video, would be great to do a side by side of this P4 1.4Ghz with the P3 1.4Gz (Tualatin) with the same Video Card and other parts and see how they compare. Personally, I run a P3 1.4Ghz with a Geforce 4 4600 and the Orpheus II. Love the setup, its so flexible, old DOS all the way through the early 2000's all on 98SE.
The P3 runs rings around it in most everything.
A 1400 Tualatin can easily keep pace with a 1.6-1.8 GHz Northwood and in some cases even a 2.0-2.4 GHz model.
The 1400 Willamette is about as fast as a 1000 Coppermine or 1200 Tualatin Celeron.
what is the model number of your CPU? SL????
The continuity RIMMs were by design due to a rather janky quirk with how Rambus RAM worked. This accounts for why there's a dummy expansion pak on the Nintendo 64 to be filled with an actual expansion pak.
I had a Pentium 4 back in the day. It was a 3.8 GHz Prescott model. I had to buy an aftermarket cooler because the one it came with could not keep up when playing "heavy" games (GTA San Andreas was OK, but Oblivion ran poorly). This was also the time of cold cathode lights and case modding. It served me well until I eventually got a Core 2 Duo some years later.
I had to get an aftermarket Zalman cooler for my Prescott, because it gave off so much heat. This was my last intel for years and started to run with the AMD Athlons for years, until Intel got it's game back with the Core i7.
Nice. 3.8 GHz was the highest official clock speed P4 reached - it never crossed the 4GHz barrier.
You were lucky I used Prescott till 2013 just for browsing the web & UA-cam,kept it running 24x7 I think that's to blame my mental disorder the immense heat in Arab desert.
@@S9uareHead They never released the 4.0 GHz model, but it was planned. But then, you could just as well do it yourself. Get a 3.0 or 3.2 GHz model and clock it yourself. And since oc goes over the FSB and the architecture really benefits from more bandwith, you'd end up with a faster model than what would be released.
@@frankg.2949 Intel became super competitive in 2006 with their Core 2 chips. Better IPC than Athlon 64 and the ability to clock higher. K10 could keep up, but that time Intel had already released Nehalem. I'd say around 2007-2018 was Intel's great time with unrivaled performance. Only Zen2 was able to catch up and beat them.
I have only Abit IS7-E2 on socket 478. I never have motherboard on socket 423, maybe in future.
P4's aged pretty well. Cheap, widely available, and super compatible for retro machines
Amd was smoking Intel in the p4 days.
Wide availability for basically free is a big plus as well. Athlon XPs were better in pretty much every way at the time, but good luck finding a working cheap one today.
..and my 1400MHz T'bird. 266MHz did not?
@@PhAyzoN You can find plenty of Athlons XP, but mostly not that higher models and also, later P4 had dual channel which makes some difference. Some decent 3 GHz P4 is perfect platform for Win 98-XP retro gaming build. Ofcourse there is nothing wrong with Athlon XP, but games back in the time were designed for HW which didn't exist yet, so when you want to play some 1999 game on ultra setting in 1280x1024, you need 3 GHz P4, all later AGP GPUs are bottlenecked even by 3GHz P4 so with some Athlon XP for socket 462, it's pointless to install better GPU than like 6600GT and even that will be bottlenecked.
i was thinking about building such a machine . my pc back them used a P2 so its soo dlow even for retro. what kind of gpu and other componebts would I need
Back in the day I had the Pentium 4 1.6A (A = Northwood) oc'ed to 2.2 GHz on a SIS 645 mainboard because Intel had only the expensive i850 with RAMBUS and the not cheap enough but really slow i845 with SDRAM. The i845D was too late for me.
In my eyes too many people are badmouthing the P4 in general as being slow and a heatplate. I think mostly because they are mixing up the different P4 cores and some because of hearsay or just to be "cool". Yes the Willamette was slow for the money especially with SDRAM. Northwood was good only the price was high at some point. Prescott was the hot one and at that time Intel was losing more ground to AMD again performance wise. And Cedar Mill was what the Prescott should have been, a die shrink with lower temps etc... But Cedar Mill was too late because the Core 2 Duo was standing at the door.
ah yes, back when a PIII at 1.3 ghz was better than a P4 at 1.4 ghz, intel never stops
Back when a PIII at 1.4 GHz was faster than a P4 at 1.8 GHz
Minor niggle -- The regular P4 topped out at 3.8 GHz, but the Xeon version went up to 3.93 GHz. I would have expected them to push to 4 GHz just for the bragging rights, but I guess even Intel was sick of the thing by then.
I like the Pentium 4, I grew up with it.
My first was a 2Ghz Northwood which was in the family PC for what felt like forever but was probably about 4 or 5 years. It replaced a 350mhz Pentium II.
Played so many great games on it with no issues and the performance was really good compared to all my friend's PCs and consoles at the time.
I eventually did an in-socket upgrade to a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 around 2006, before building my first PC later that year based on a socket 775 3.4Ghz cedar mill Pentium 4.
Thought that was awesome until I upgraded to a Q9650 in 2009; biggest upgrade I've ever done by the way.
I now have two Windows XP gaming PCs with Pentium 4 extreme editions. One is a socket 478 3.2Ghz version, the other is a socket 775 3.4Ghz version.
I still have a 3.0 GHz Cedar Mill here, and while it can reach 4 GHz fine, it will get completely destroyed by a single core Conroe Celeron.
I have a soft spot for LGA775, the fact that a 3 GHz single core Pentium 4 (or downclocked to 2.4 GHz) can run on the same platform as a 4 GHz Core 2 Quad with about 9 times the performance is just crazy. And overclocking still takes some work. It isn't just more vcore and upping the multi. Everything is done through the FSB, so northbridge clock, memory clock, memory strap, etc are all connected.
@@HappyBeezerStudios I've still got my Cedar Mill 641 that I bought back in 2006. Great CPU, I overclocked it to 5Ghz once, don't think it was stable but it was still mind blowing back then. I have found that the Pentium 4 Gallatin extreme edition is slightly faster in games though so that's why I run it in my retro rig.
I learnt on the 775 platform and like you have a soft spot for it. The first 3 PCs that I built were all 775 so it still feels natural to me to do FSB overclocking. I didn't upgrade to anything else until 2014 when I got a 4690k.
I do remember my parents own pc back then. It has Pentium 4 1.4GHz (used socket 423 with RDRAM) and ATI Radeon 9250 AGP.
Altho I'm only played some MMORPG games like Wow but never tried other 3d games before.
The P4 is a perfect example of when Intel allowed their marketing department to fully drive the engineering. The goal was sky high clock speeds at all costs, hence the super deep pipeline and other design decisions. It's a CPU line that it easily overlooked these days in large part because the chips that came before and after it from both AMD and Intel were so much better in many ways.
For me the P4 generation is when I went over to AMD for a while. I had been with Intel through the Slot 1 and Socket 370 gens after spending the entire Socket 7 generation with AMD chips. Then in 2001 I attended a pop-up AMD Roadshow event in Chicago IL at the launch of the Athlon XP line and won a MSI motherboard and Athlon XP 1800+ CPU which at the time was their fastest chip. So I stuck with AMD through the Athlon XP days. Later on I had a Barton core Athlon XP 2500+ CPU that I had overclocked to 3200+ speeds which served me well until the time when the later Core 2 and AM2 based Athlons were common.
I did end up using a lot of P4 based machines at work though (I was an IT contractor for the US Army then) and quite a few of them were dog slow, especially when they got hot and thermal throttled. A P4 was fairly well behaved in a stable temperature environment, but put one in a warehouse or factory setting and boy were they a pain! I was so glad when the Core 2 based machines came in to replace them.
P4 with mechanical HDD, low RAM and Vista. Tech support worst nightmare
At that time Intel didn't know P4 wouldn't scale that well in terms of frequency and that it would encounter major headwind in the form of TDP. AMD was worse. It knew about the problems of P4 but still decided to release Bulldozer.
@@Alex-df4lt NetBurst, Bulldozer, POWER6, all designs aimed to go to super high clocks, replaced by lower clocking, high IPC designs, that managed to reach the same actual clocks.
Yes, in 2007, just when Intel went away from their GHz race, IBM decided to release 5 GHz CPUs. And not only that, POWER6 was in-order.
your FX 5500 seems to have 3 swollen capacitors on it, replace them and it will probably work fine again, hell replace all 6, even the other 3 that look fine probably no longer have their original capacity
Back to 2001 had Pentium 4 1.6 GHz with geforce 2 & was happy 😄
Amazing combination.
Still running a P4-2.8HT with 1GB ram and a SSD caddy so I can (drive swap) run DOS, win98, winXP and even Vista on it. It has 2x voodoo2 cards, ATI 9800, SBlive!.. Works great for all my retro gaming needs from mid 90's to mid 2000's.
Cheers!
That is a sweet setup.
I had P4 Prescott HT, ATI Radeon 9800xt, 1GB of RAM and 19" CRT... Killer PC back then...
I still have intel pentium 4 2.0 ghz with intel extreme graphic ( spoiler alert, performance not so extreme) in my old pc
I had one of these and used it until 2008... Boy did it suck in 2008, by then it was barely usable.
I was using a Pentium 4 670 model until spring 2012 as my daily driver. It only struggled with video over 720p but other than that it still performed fine. Obviously gaming would be another story.
@@EgoShredder That's a significantly faster and newer one, not surprising it lasted until 2012.
Rambus was the stupidest things in pc industry ever. I would not used that in any retro pc.
Thank you for the new format Phil. Artention to detail is always a BIG+. I can't believe you actually owned a P4 back in the day. I owned an AMD Athlon setup initially with a Duron 600 and eventually an Athlon 1400. That build lasted until my Intel Core second gen build- you must have been REALLY well off to go Pentium 4 at a time when it cost like 4x more and consistently lost to AMD... not that it is bad to be wealthy but P4 was really flexing financial muscle back in the day.
It was a Pentium 4 2.6 with DDR. So it was much later and competition was strong between Intel and AMD. PCs were not expensive at the time, it was very competitive with new things coming out all the time!
Interesting video! Although the P4 Willamette wasn't a great CPU, it still is very nice for a Windows 98 retro system.
Indeed
Willamette was sort of a proof of concept. Completely inferior to Tualatin, but functional.
Northwood was the height of the architecture. Massive increases in clocks (and thus performance) and unbeatable (at the time) in some tasks.
Prescott lenghened the pipeline, reduced IPC but couldn't balance that out with even higher clocks. It was pretty much unable to do what it was designed for.
Cedar Mill was pretty much just a shrink of Prescott, but fixed the power draw and is a decent ship. Pretty much what Prescott should've been from the start.
At the time I did almost went to the Pentium 4 route. And in fact I did get the P4 motherboard, but with Asus CT-479 adapter and with a Pentium M socket 479 mobile chip. It was mostly faster than any of the Pentium 4 chips. I first had it with Pentium M 755 and later upgraded it to the Pentium M 780. The graphics card what I used came from Gainward 7800GS+ Golden sample 512MB. It was actually a 7900GT but in AGP! I still have that computer and use it when I feel like playing some retro games.
The Pentium M were amazing.
Later p4 were pretty good, nice rivalty with AMD in those years. The HT models took the edge back from AMD in some applications if I remember well
Sad story time. Around the time Prince of Persia was being promoted by intel, i asked for a p4 upgrade our home pc. My dad told me it was expensive and I should have it done professionally. I assured him it was fine, "i got this". My birthday rolled around so did the p4 with hyperthreading. I ripped appart the pc and popped in the new cpu and slapped the cooler back on ...to no post situation. I had bent a few pins... No biggie. Just grab an exacto knife and... I had a row of bent pins. Okay slight panic but fixible ... A row of bent pins and 3 had broken off..... So i did the best thing i could... and hid the broken brand new cpu... Put the pc back together without reapplying new thermal paste and hope it still runs.... And it did! Err. Well it walked. It was throttling like crazy with worse perfmance than ever before.
"Hows that new processor?" 😃
"It's great dad. It does so many good things." 😶 (😭)
Dad lives the rest of his life happy with himself and impressed with me.
I live in shame, never talking about it again.
I got into pc gaming in 2013 and wow. I know how bad i messed up. Never got to tell my dad in the end. I miss him. Biggest ooof .... 😩
Thank you for sharing this!
I wanted an Athlon XP for my Windows 98 machine but I'm having no luck with the motherboards. Since I have several P4 machines I went with a P4 2.66Ghz on an Asus P4S8X-X, GeForce FX 5600 128MB and Sound Blaster Live SB0060, so my current setup is very similar to the one you tested, except for DDR instead of RDRAM, 2 real IDEs with 80GB and 320GB, and dual booting Win98 and Win2000 on the same partition 🙂
I've bought a lot of sc 462 motherboards in last few months for few bucks here in Czech Republic, not always in great condition, but it always worked. I can't imagine living in country where you have only eBay with their crazy prices, those worldwide sellers are totaly crazy. Sometimes it's enough to just visit some local computer store and ask if they have some "old trash" and very often they have and they are happy that you will take it for free. 🙂
Makes me wonder why Windows 2000. Might be just for period correctness, but there isn't anything that 2000 does that XP can't do either, but with support for some newer software. Yes, it means going to "classic" layout, but should do fine. On my 933 MHz Pentium 3 build I'M running 98 SE and XP on 256 MB RAM and XP is just fine. In fact, with my CRT it feels snappier than my modern machine with modern parts.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Wrong, I thought that XP is just reskined 2000 for a long time, but even when core is almost the same, there is massive difference in compatibility with old games and software. Win 2000 has advantages of NT, it knows NTFS file system, it's stable, it knows USB 2.0 AND compatibility with Win 9x games is much better than in XP for some reason. Try for example AvP1 or NFS 5, both games are bugged in XP, but work totaly fine in 2000. Ofcourse you can use Win 98 or ME, but 2000 has drivers for HW to like 2005, so you can build superior computer for these late Win 9x games. Test it, I am not kidding, compatibility in Win 2000 with old games is much better and it's better to play DOS games in DOS box now, so I don't really need actual Win 9x based OS.
@@HappyBeezerStudios The explanation is very simple. I have 3 retro machines, the older one runs Win3+1+Win95+NT4 (3Dfx games), the 2nd one runs Win98SE+Win2K, the 3rd one runs WinXP+Win7 (DX9 and above). Basically for nostalgia since I've used all these OSes extensively over the years, also because dual/triple booting requires less physical machines 🙂
A P4 with Intel 845 chipset has given me almost zero problems over the years. No matter which card I've used with it
That's a really awesome project I'm actually thinking of going with a P4 (S478) for my retro 98 machine for some old Star Trek Games for the more authentic feel tbh! :3
My first proper PC was the AthlonXP which ran 98 and XP very very well, I have an ATI HD 3650 512MB AGP that I'm looking to use as the old Catalyst drivers I remember worked wonderfully for the games I played back in the day :)
You was very lucky if that HD3650 AGP worked without problems, these late ATI GPUs for AGP slots were very problematical. I have one HD4650 now and in some MBs it doesn't even give you image (some socket 462 MBs), I had even problem in sc754 MB, it kind of worked, but there were some problems. Only platform where it works without any issues are late sc 478 MBs, so Pentium 4 plaftorm.
Had a 3.2ghz northwood in back in the day the performance felt good for the time and it never gave me any problems. Also currently have a 3.15ghz northwood paired with a Voodoo 5500.
Yea I had the same experience. Simply just enjoying the games :)
Oh things go wrong. Things always go wrong. Lmao. I say this as I fight with a board i am suspecting is flakey.
Pentium 4 is very underrated. They are cheap, plenty available and very reliable. Athlon XP are dying from lack of IHS and many cracks on the die from bigger coolers.
oh, the amount of chipped Athlons are truly something else.
Interesting Video. I did not know that the early P4 had such a bad reputation back then. My first gaming pc with a CPU in the GHz range was a Pentium 4, 1,5 GHz with intel 850gbc mainboard and Asus v7100 as a graphics card and I was blown away. But I was coming from P2 266 MHz system so this was not hard. I do not have the system anymore but I will go back into Windows 98 gaming again and want to make super high end system I could never afford back then.
The PIII was a much better CPU but the P4 was more powerful. They killed the P4 line and went back to the PIII which went on to become the Core2.
Pentium 4 was a marketing child. Who could say no do commercials going on about the "2.4 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor", when the closest Athlon had 1.8 GHz.
The first computer I built for myself out of parts was a P4. The capacitor plague took it before its 4th birthday, but I will always have some nostalgia for these hot beasts.
I bought a pc only once in 2000. It was Amd K6-2 500mhz. After that I always got free pc, at work and gifts once every 5 years.
Its insane. I used this EXACT same setup until 2013 (was the family computer). I overclocked the P4 to 1.6ghz (i had no idea what i was doing) and somehow burnt out my fx 5200 at some point trying to swap it into something else. It was a horrible machine but it gave me my love for older computers and introduced me to loads of older games (such as system shock 2!). Still have the computer today. Super cool video.
Whenever i see a pentium4 i get nervous twitches and bad memories, i had the socket478 1.7ghz version, but it was no match for my older pentium 3
Happy Friday Phil! I love the Pentium 4 platform. I just built a P4 system as a WinXP gaming rig. It uses an nForce chipset but works grand under XP. I do have a couple Dell socket 478 builds as well that dual boot 98 and XP, and they run perfectly including dual channel DDR 400 ram. I do have one socket 423 board that uses Rambus, but it’s a little finicky so I never used it in a full build. Thanks for sharing Phil!
Many of the Dell machines had Intel OEM boards and good reliability.
I don't like nForce chipsets, I always had problems with that. For socket 478 boards, I prefer Intel 865 chipsets, it supports prescott and DDR400 and it's reliable, no problems with late AGP cards etc....
Intel was in Fry's electronics demo'ing the new 1.4ghz system with Quake 3. Was so impressed I plopped down my credit card and got the motherboard/cpu/ram combo. Prior to my P4, upgrades were almost yearly. I think I managed to keep mine running up until 2006 or so, when the first Core2Duo's came out. My system at the time was pretty speedy. I had an Adaptec SCSI controller, a 15k RPM drive. I clutched onto my Glide graphics as long as I could.
I was putting a new machine together from scratch in early 2002, and the Pentium 4 1.7GHz was the current one at the time if I remember correctly, but I chose to go with a Celeron 1200 Tualatin CPU, due to people saying the Pentium was still being out performed by the Pentium III. The gap between the PIII and Celeron model was not massive at the time, so I saved some money instead.
Still have my 3.4 Northwood. Great stable system back in the day. Kept me warm at night too.
My first computer had Pentium 4 that was almost 20 years ago. It was the era of Windows XP. Back then 512mb can make your computer so fast.
Fun fact: I still have the original computer case.
I found duron 1.3GHz with a 6200 turbo cache in a skip, i tried an athlon 2100+ and it worked and then a 2700+ which worked as well, along with a 9800 Pro card. Runs 98 SE perfectly. It's damn fast, stupid overkilll. Has an ISA slot too, i put an awe64 value in and works in native dos.
Love your work Phil!
Thank you!
At that time I didn't have a Pentium 4, but always Athlon systems. Since the platform has largely passed me by, I put together some from all generations of Socket 423, 478 and 775 in my Retro PC collection today. I even have a PC with Socket 604 and 2x Xeon 3.6 GHz HT processors with 8 Gb DDR Ram from 2003. It manages 14000 points with 1280 x 1024, 32 bit and triple buffering in 3dmark 01. As a graphics card, however, I use a much newer Radeon R7 250 with 2 GB because it still works under XP.
The 775 system is a Dell Dimension 5000 with GTX 750 upgraded.
The 478 system is a 3.2Ghz HT P4 with Radeon 1950 Pro
And the 423 system has 1.7 Ghz and a Geforce 3 Ti 200
The Athlon was kind of the enthusiast's choice, put the p4 always just worked. I liked the stability and the compatibility, less drivers issues on intel.
That's exactly what I am saying for almost 20 years, I never liked that AMD fanatic army. Yes, Athlon XP was more energy efficient, but it was not THAT good as they were saying and CPU alone is not everything, you neeed to look even at motherboards and sc 462 motherboards were so outdated, you still had to set FSB manualy, so some people had just basic CPU frequency because they didn't know what to do with that, it still didn't have dual channel and compatibility with late AGP cards was pretty bad.
Some later sc 462 MBs didn't even have USB keyboard option in bios and I remember USB keyboards were already pretty common in like 2003, Intel MBs supported this already on most of socket 370 boards. Ofcourse USB keyboard worked in bios and on post screen, but it didn't work on "press any key to continue" screen while installing Windows. 🙂
But if you like sado-maso, then sc462 is a perfect platform for you.
Some late decent sc 478 MB is the best platform for superiour Win 9x retro gaming computer.
For the energy-conscious among you I would suggest getting an AMD Geode NX 1750. It is basically just an Athlon XP running with very low voltage. The NX 1750 for example runs at 1.4 GHz, 1.25V and a max TDP of 25W. There's even lower voltage models but you won't find many mainboards that support such low voltages (as low as 1.0V). So beforehand make sure the mainboards supports low voltages otherwise it will run with something like 1.45V or higher. I use an ASRock K7S41GX with my NX 1750. If you even use the onboard GPU and no dedicated graphics I think you can get some impressive energy-efficiency out of such a system. Phil also has a video on the Geode NX 1750, you might want to check it out.
It's really nice to see this reviews of old, bad, failed hardware. Not only good parts reviews are interesting to watch ❤
I remember messing with a P4 1.4 GHZ with RAMbus memory back in 2001. Was a headache to it to work get properly allround. Compared to a "just" 1 GHz PIII or the Athlon T-Bird, which was totally stable and at least as fast for gaming - even just using SDR memory. I'm guessing The RAMbus / mainboard chipset must have had compatibility issues. But the P4 paired with DDR memory I always found stable.
I have lots of LGA 478 P4 processors but sadly too few working boards thanks to bad caps.
The 1.4 - 1.5 - 1.6 GHz P4 models (i think there was a 1.3 GHz sku as well?) were pretty abysmal, performance and thermal wise. Basically a high-clock P3 was better, not to mention AMD's impressive Athlon XP CPUs. Still, Intel sold a huge number of them because they came with every new OEM pc ("Intel Inside" was a huge marketing gimmick at the time). You could only get AMD if you made the computer yourself, at least where I lived.
Never had a 423 or 478 P4. I used a Socket 370 Pentium 3 866Mhz (overclocked, 6.5 multiplier at 155Mhz FSB was 1.04 GHz). I used that machine well beyond it being obsolete but being in my early 20s...gaming wasn't a big concern.
P4 3.2 clocked to 4.0, 7950 GT, 4 gigs of Corsair Ram, Asus board, don't remember the chipset right now, and a couple of highspeed drives in raid... Good times. Still have a few old P4 machines laying around. Creative sound card with Z5500 speakers... liked my old P4 computers. I have an old 3.4 extreme edition, that would only run 3.6, and a 7800GS Golden Sample with the unauthorized 7950's chipset. This video makes me want to play around with that old hardware.
In a vacuum the Pentium 4 is okay, but I too, had a Pentium 4 (2.6GHz HT) and felt really burnt by the computer shop that built my system and convince Mum and I that it was superior to AMD. A year later after issues with the motherboard they specced and other things, I built my own system, this time I went with an AMD 3500+, 6800 Ultra and Creative Audigy. It was significantly better in every way. I stayed with AMD up until 2011 when they really fell behind with Bulldozer. Now I'm rocking Ryzen. Their rise from near death has been truly remarkable to watch, especially from someone who has been fond of them as the underdogs (financially and size)
P4 1.6 Ghz Willamette AGP 4X ECS Elitegroup MB/ SiS chipset .Learned how to download chipset drivers from manufacturers website didn't realize they worked better than generic windows drivers. Went with the onboard graphics for a long time then got a GeForce2 MX 200 32Mb 😆
im in the camp of not liking the P4, but thats because i actually had them back then and i remember my P4 478 northwood at 2.8GHz were shit comapred to my friends Athlon 64 3200+which didn't have hyper threading, less ram on the system and 2GHz base clock(slight bump to 2.2GHz if memory serves) :D
I was like, im gonna do one better and changed out the board to a 775 asus(wtih a VIA chipset and AGP slot for my 6600GT) and the cpu was a pentium D 830, which i manged to get to 3.6Ghz with a giant tower cooler from some chinese brand with two fans.
then i finally had the faster pc :D and a year or two later he got an E6600 and i was beat once again until i got a new one, it was a fun rivalary :D
I currently run a Pentium 4 in my Win98 machine, albeit a faster clock with a Radeon 9800 currently. Its a great system and I've been really happy with the performance from it. admittedly I am also running a nicer Zalman cooler on it too however :)
I dont have any GLQuake benchmarks unfortunately, but I did find the Radeon 9250 was very GPU limited on a lot of my benchmarks (Quake 2, 3, Unreal Gold, Unreal Torunament, andUnreal Tournament 2004), showing no difference in benchmark from a 1.6 Ghz all the way up to 3Ghz, whereas the Radeon 9800 showed vast improvements as clocks increased and still more again when overclocked. The top end gpus of the time definitely have some more headroom to play with thats for sure.
That 5500 looked like it had bad caps. Locations C170 and C190 respectively.
Willamette was my first processor. I was pissed with how slow it was compared to my old 566MHz Pentium 3 that I OCed to 800+MHz.
I also hated how my Willamette board used RD-RAM (rambus) which was expensive as heck.
Jumped to Northwood, then to Prescott, and quickly to Wolfdale (E2160). The E2160 was a godsend!
hot chicks still need it ?
I had a Pentium 4 once, but it was actually an emergency computer I bought for £5.
It was 2013/14, my old 2.6gHz Athlon64 x2 broke down and I needed a computer for work reasons, but I had almost no money whatsoever. It come with Windows XP installed and was painfully slow.
I taken it to recycling with glee when I finally managed to find a cheap used Core 2 Quad about 5 months later. I kinda wish I knew then what I did now, but hindsight is always 20/20.
To tell you the truth I was a red team guy all the way! AMD an ATI, my very own firts pc was a celeron 2.46 ghz and 128 kb l2 cache, I thought that the older pentium 3 family pc was faster. I was so naive back in those days, I made the worst combo ever, a nvidia fx5200 and that celery ha! But later that year I got a athlon 64 3200+ socket 939 with an amd x200 chipset and an ATI x800xl. A world of performance difference! Forgot to add that I was running windows XP
That Geforce FX5500: Looks like the capacitor top left is swollen. Might be a bad angle, but normally that caused the glitching and instability. This bring back so many memories! We had a 1.7 Pentium 4 on Intel Desktop Board. Once I replaced all the caps on a glitching motherboard with onboard graphics. It actually worked, and the PC was usable again.
Yes, Willamette likely got dumped on for using a T-bird-like 1.75V, while not performing better than a T-bird 800 or 900 in many cases. Northwood was very good, but one I was testing was at 45C idle and I've been told that they were cool chips, IIRC.
To me, Pentium 4 shine with the Northwood core. Socket 478, 3.2Ghz with HT and FSB 800. This was a solid processor back in the day. But i went AMD side with AXP 3200+ because it was cheaper and perform about the same.
Great video Phil! Format was great and thanks for running through those games. I picked up a brand new Asus P4B (478) and paired it with a 1.8ghz P4 running 98. I've also got P4 650HT running xp, and some spare P4 630's.
It's always fun playing with P4 machines!
Great to hear!
My first P4 was a 2.66 Ghz single core, non HT model. 533 Mhz front side bus. Those maxed out at the 3.06 Ghz and it HAD HT. The only chip in the line that did. Mine did not of course. The board I got with it was standard socket 478, no name. 2 Memory slots. Really cheap made board I got at a Taiwanese trade show that happens yearly in NY. It was good for what it was. It wasn't as fast as the Athlon XP 2 Ghz I had but it was really close in most ways except in gaming. Where the Athlon got more frames. So I used it as my HTPC and let the kids watch movies on it. Also used it before I went to bed to watch shows. Good times. My children were all home and were all so young. They are all in or out of college already. Time goes so fast.
i used to play a game call 1NSANE on my P3 933 Mhz PC, is a very similar game.
I was an early adopter, with a 1.5GHz Willamette P4 on socket 423. It was not great and there were many regrets. Especially since socket 423 was a dead end.
i didn't realize till now that rambus memory was in anything past socket 423 , i have an asus P4T i snatched from ebay 5-6 years ago for $16 shipped which is the socket 423 with rambus memory , it came with the 1.7ghz pentium 4 which i believe was the best one on the platform
Some people in Latin America called it the Lentium 4 (Len as in Lento=slow).
Never had a bad experience. the other systems I used back then were one with a Celeron 700 MHz and a 900Mhz board soldered Duron.
lol I had one of these CPUs and held onto it for far too long, my next one was an i5-2500K. I remember later benchmarking a Raspberry Pi and finding it was about equal with the P4 but obviously used a mere fraction of the power.
My Radeon 9550 scores almost 10k in 3dmark 2000 (9863), actually faster than fx5700LE by 41%
P4 the biggest failure intel ever had was building thousands system builds back then while amd crashed intel from 2000 to 2007 in every way around back then from first 64bit and intel had to buy out the technology for future generations to and first dual cores amd p4 was well known to be a good griller to cook specially prescott something intel slowly recovered then by 2007 into core 2 something similar going on now with intel again using old 6 year architectures pumping them just with new futures to catch up with amd but it cant since 2006 intel is gone maybe they will better recover by 2025 when they build ther new fabs and better nm
I never had an Athlon XP but instead a P4 ‘c’ Northwood 2.4GHz overclocked to 3.3! Great chip.
Much better choice than a 1.4ghz p4 would be a pentium 3, better performance and less temperature.
Ther Architecture of P4 was not good, with core2duo they continued the P3 Architecture.
Found one of these in a Dell at a thrift store for $20 recently, while wanting a cheap Win98. for retro gaming…it’s been a pleasure for the price!