Project: Retro Pentium 4

[Deleted member 41019]

I have something much 'retro'. P2 333Mhz, maxed out. Asus DVD drive, USB 2.0 card, etc. More retro.

700GBP only. 14 inch CRT free just for you.

/trollbait

LOL

I loved the PII (being a bit of an intel man) but the G3 was so much nicer to use.

Got a lovely 486DX2 sat on top of my wardrobe, Here is the post: LINK

 

[DayKnight]

LOL

I loved the PII (being a bit of an intel man) but the G3 was so much nicer to use.

Got a lovely 486DX2 sat on top of my wardrobe, Here is the post: LINK

That is ancient.

 

[Deleted member 41019]

That is ancient.

But lovely?

 

[brandonwh64]

We have stacks of P4 combos at work sitting in a closet. May pull one out and see if setfsb still works

 

[Deleted member 41019]

We have stacks of P4 combos at work sitting in a closet. May pull one out and see if setfsb still works

While I love new tech there is a charm to the older stuff and this system kind of captures an era in computing I really had fun with.

 

[Aquinus]

Much like my own skt478 board sitting in the attic, you have some SATA 1.5GB ports which will drive just about any 7200 RPM modern drive at full speed. Even though it's a retro build, SATA did still exist back then and it doesn't hurt to use it if you can because IDE is dead slow. I know from personal experience that those 1.5Gbps ports will run at that speed, which is enough to saturate 1Gbps LAN for a NAS as well. Just saying as it could make a P4 feel a lot more snappy than it used to.

 

[Deleted member 41019]

Much like my own skt478 board sitting in the attic, you have some SATA 1.5GB ports which will drive just about any 7200 RPM modern drive at full speed. Even though it's a retro build, SATA did still exist back then and it doesn't hurt to use it if you can because IDE is dead slow. I know from personal experience that those 1.5Gbps ports will run at that speed, which is enough to saturate 1Gbps LAN for a NAS as well. Just saying as it could make a P4 feel a lot more snappy than it used to.

I have a 640GB WD Caviar Blue sat here doing nothing. It's only had like 100 days spin time so should be good for a while. 16MB of Cache would be nice.

Not sure what I'll do about it yet but if I decide to go ahead with it I'll break out the old Clonezilla disk. Thinking about it I may do that anyway and compare the speeds. One thing is for sure though, I really need to go back and sort out some services and kill a few unneeded processes as i have really let the maintenance slack.

 

[m0nt3]

I just completed my Retro Gaming rig. I love it, kudos sir.

Mine is:
Athlon XP-M @ 2.25Ghz
2*1 GB Crucial DDR400
ATi Radeon X800 Pro
500 and 200 GB IDE HDD's
SB Audigy Gamer

Love playing some old games (currently playing morrowind) on this computer. Amazing what the old single core CPU's could do.

 

[suraswami]

Socket A was some fun times

Especially the pencil mod to increase default votage and wire trick to make it multi unlocked!!

Good going there with your build.

I have the modern day P4 - A.K.A FX 8350!!

 

[Deleted member 41019]

I just completed my Retro Gaming rig. I love it, kudos sir.

Mine is:
Athlon XP-M @ 2.25Ghz
2*1 GB Crucial DDR400
ATi Radeon X800 Pro
500 and 200 GB IDE HDD's
SB Audigy Gamer

Love playing some old games (currently playing morrowind) on this computer. Amazing what the old single core CPU's could do.

Oh my goodness. I'm drooling at the thought of the Athlon XP. They were awesome CPUs

 

[Deleted member 41019]

Especially the pencil mod to increase default votage and wire trick to make it multi unlocked!!

Good going there with your build.

I have the modern day P4 - A.K.A FX 8350!!

Yep I modded quite a few with some good old graphite

 

[m0nt3]

Yea, love my athlon xp. It was the first computer i built. The original cpu died which was a 2700+. Still the same Abit NF-7S with the mcp-t south bridge with soundstorm. My original video card was a 9800 non-pro also dead. Same PSU antec truepower 430 watt. Had to replace a few caps and good as new. Those radeon cards were amazing for the time. I think a lot of the comes from dedicated shader hardware as oppoesed to unified shaders.

 

[suraswami]

Yea, love my athlon xp. It was the first computer i built. The original cpu died which was a 2700+. Still the same Abit NF-7S with the mcp-t south bridge with soundstorm. My original video card was a 9800 non-pro also dead. Same PSU antec truepower 430 watt. Had to replace a few caps and good as new. Those radeon cards were amazing for the time. I think a lot of the comes from dedicated shader hardware as oppoesed to unified shaders.

Not knowing much about power requirements and how hungry the 9800 pro versions, I blew up a whole computer all because of that 9800 pro (cheap psu caught fire). Everything fried except that sucker, memory and the Duron CPU!!! All OS and data gone. Board died too. Lucky I bought extended warranty on the board from Frys and they replaced it and was up and running with a new hdd. WD replaced the fried hdd no questions. Those Durons are fun little bastards!!

 

[m0nt3]

I was worried about my PSU, which is why I sprung for the 430 watt antec true power, which is still working great 11 years later. I used it all the way up through my dual core cpu finally the lack of SATA power connections and PCI-E power connections made me retire it.

@OP, have you ran any benchmarks on it? I would be curious to compare results. X800 Pro vs 3650 was it? My CPU isn't quite as fast, but should be interesting.

 

[Deleted member 41019]

I was worried about my PSU, which is why I sprung for the 430 watt antec true power, which is still working great 11 years later. I used it all the way up through my dual core cpu finally the lack of SATA power connections and PCI-E power connections made me retire it.

@OP, have you ran any benchmarks on it? I would be curious to compare results. X800 Pro vs 3650 was it? My CPU isn't quite as fast, but should be interesting.

Just ran the latest Passmark on the system today. Here are the results:

 

[m0nt3]

 

[Deleted member 41019]

I'm looking at a water cooling solution as it seems the air cooler is slowing me down. Under intensive load I'm getting some serious CUP throttle but with this series of P4 even intel were aware of the issues.

One thing the Prescott cores did well was produce heat and that is something i need to get sorted out asap. She will idle at around 45 degrees and that's just not healthy.

I have a big update coming soon for this project and I may be asking for some help tracking down a water cooling system for a socket 478.


Anyway more to come soon.

 

[m0nt3]

Interesting, My CPU score was higher, 3D was terrible for me, probably due to lack of DX10 support and you stomped me on memory speed. I thought with a 1.2GHz advatage the P4 would have edged out the old Athlon XP lol.

 

[Deleted member 41019]

Interesting, My CPU score was higher, 3D was terrible for me, probably due to lack of DX10 support and you stomped me on memory speed. I thought with a 1.2GHz advatage the P4 would have edged out the old Athlon XP lol.

I'm not sure if it is due to the heat problems this CPU currently has. On paper it should have done better but there are factors to consider here and that is that we have, of course heat issues and CPU throttling as well as this CPU has had a great deal of life and has quite a few calculations on it after all these years. I'm going to do some more research on it and try to figure out why she scored so low.


As for the Radeon HD 3670 I'm quite lucky in the fact it has support for DX10.1 but if memory serves the tests were run in OpenGL 2.0 and from my experience OpenGL tests are a lot less intensive.

 

[OneMoar]

the althlon's of the era where always superior to the Pentium's funny because now adays the situation is reversed

 

[m0nt3]

Clock for clock there were, certainly. I didn't know you were having throttling issues either, that sucks, we called them preshotts for a reason (I am assuming it is a prescott core?) The Athlon XP is no spring chicken either, it is probably older than that Pentium 4

The current situation is like a direct reversal, kind of ironic.

 

[Deleted member 41019]

Clock for clock there were, certainly. I didn't know you were having throttling issues either, that sucks, we called them preshotts for a reason (I am assuming it is a prescott core?) The Athlon XP is no spring chicken either, it is probably older than that Pentium 4

The current situation is like a direct reversal, kind of ironic.

Yeah this was a 'brown box' special from Intel. Most came with no retail packaging or stock heatsink included, this was one of them.

Intel knew they pushed the 478 too far with this hence they migrated the slightly redesigned Prescotts over to the LGA platform as they had larger surface areas to spread the dye out a bit and most 775's as we know have larger heatsinks than the 478's ever could have.

The Pentium 4 was a good chip but it was built in the era of "moar GHZ plz!" so they pushed to try and get the 4.0GHZ single core barrier but ultimately failed. One of the reasons they went back to the PIII was because of it's stability and reliability as well as the opportunity to expand on the technology there and bring us multi-core CPUs.

Todays 'I series' processors have more in common with their Pentium III Grandfather then they ever do with the Pentium 4. It's not that the Pentium 4 was a failure, it was just pushed too far too fast.

There are many youtube videos that explains why the Pentium 3 was picked up for the Core2 series and not the Pentium 4 although they are looking at the Pentium 4 again for some inspiration for new dyes, that maybe because of the rise in closed-loop water coolers now.

 

[kniaugaudiskis]

I'm currently waiting for some new PC parts to arrive and that's a perfect excuse to play around with my retro nostalgia socket 939 rig which I built a few years ago:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.4GHz 2x1MB 939 (Toledo) cooled by Zalman CNPS7700CU cooler
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
MSI GeForce 7900GTX 512MB
2,048MB of Kingston HyperX 400MHz CL2.5 RAM
500GB HDD
480W PSU
Windows XP Professional

I've been on this rig for something like a week already and I can say it handles basic tasks really well, even plays Youtube 720P videos without a single stutter. Almost all games from 2005-2006 are also butter smooth, the 7900GTX sporting 24pixel and 8 vertex pipes ticking at 650MHz is not a joke. The reason this rig feels special to me dates back to when I was 13 years old and had just got into the world of PC hardware. Back then the best chips you could get were Athlon 64 FX-55 2.6GHz and Pentium 4 3.4GHz EE (Gallatin core) from AMD and Intel respectively. I remember I found it really hard to understand how a lower clocked Athlon 64 chip could outperform a higher clocked Pentium 4 chip, so AMD Athlon 64 chips felt somewhat special to me. When the Athlon 64 X2 chips hit the market in 2005 I was under the impression they were sick fast, especially the $1000 X2 4800+. All newer stuff now just comes and goes, however, AMD Athlon 64 series is here to stay with me.

 

[m0nt3]

I remember getting excited about 3DFX Voodoo's. Back when Babages had voodoo displays and I was drooling over them. I was to young for a job back then. I built me a 4400+ toledo with a X1900XTX and an Abit At832 what ever the ATi R580 crossfire board was called (still being used daily today, although with a different video card).

The first computer I built was an Athlon XP 2700+, I was kinda nooby then but I was really considering a P4, after the toms hardware video that showed the tibrd athlon catch fire after the heatsink was removed while the P4 kept going. In trying to under stand the rating system of the Athlon XP's and performance variance between clock speeds and architecture got me reading about the differences between the P6(pentium 3) and netburt (pentium 4) architecture.

 

[Deleted member 41019]

I'm currently waiting for some new PC parts to arrive and that's a perfect excuse to play around with my retro nostalgia socket 939 rig which I built a few years ago:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.4GHz 2x1MB 939 (Toledo) cooled by Zalman CNPS7700CU cooler
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
MSI GeForce 7900GTX 512MB
2,048MB of Kingston HyperX 400MHz CL2.5 RAM
500GB HDD
480W PSU
Windows XP Professional

I've been on this rig for something like a week already and I can say it handles basic tasks really well, even plays Youtube 720P videos without a single stutter. Almost all games from 2005-2006 are also butter smooth, the 7900GTX sporting 24pixel and 8 vertex pipes ticking at 650MHz is not a joke. The reason this rig feels special to me dates back to when I was 13 years old and had just got into the world of PC hardware. Back then the best chips you could get were Athlon 64 FX-55 2.6GHz and Pentium 4 3.4GHz EE (Gallatin core) from AMD and Intel respectively. I remember I found it really hard to understand how a lower clocked Athlon 64 chip could outperform a higher clocked Pentium 4 chip, so AMD Athlon 64 chips felt somewhat special to me. When the Athlon 64 X2 chips hit the market in 2005 I was under the impression they were sick fast, especially the $1000 X2 4800+. All newer stuff now just comes and goes, however, AMD Athlon 64 series is here to stay with me.
View attachment 58581

Would love some pictures of the rig ;D