Was pentium 4 an over engineered CPU?

[INSTG8R]

Sandybridge will be their crowning achievement. My 2600K ran 1Ghz over stock 24/7 never once complained stayed cool couldn’t ask for anything more

 

[windwhirl]

This, essentially. XP could run on a Pentium III reasonably well so of course a Pentium 4 was great for it.

XP even ran OK with a Pentium MMX 233, provided you had a decent amount of RAM for the time, like 128-256 MB range

I had that. It only went to hell some years down the line when Windows Update needed to stick around for like half-hour calculating which updates you needed (because it seemed to run through every single KB ever, calculating dependencies, superseded updates and such).

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Pentium 4 was okay with Northwood, as it overclocked well and temps were reasonable. It's successor, Prescott, was a disaster, made worse because cooling solutions at the time were not ready to handle the thermals, resulting in loud baseline computing. I remember using an OEM Prescott machine at the time (Dell, perhaps), and just using basic Windows, you could hear the CPU fan ramp up and down constantly. And it was a pitchy fan note. I think thermal solutions caught up by Pentium D, but it was still an inferior solution compared to native dual core Athlons.

We've repeated history a few times now when it comes to chasing clock speed at all costs, and it seems to end in the same way--with a bust and a "dark age" from the vendor. It took Intel a few years to recover from Netburst, AMD even longer to recover from Bulldozer. Now here we are again, with Raptor Lake fizzling out, and Intel struggling to replace it with something competitive.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

OCed a few. Prescott from what I remember clocked up past 4ghz alright. Dont remember Northwood clocking that well at all. 3ghz maybe a little more.

where not over-engineered though. Not sure what that even supposed to mean??

 

[DaemonForce]

My first pc back in 2005 was powered by intel p4 3.00ghz CPU. I don't know if I'm exxegareting but I remember it was so smooth and quick CPU even for today's standards.

You mean this junk? Prescott was a WILD cut above everything and it sure seemed good...Coming from an overclocked K6.

I preferred to main Longhorn at some point and that gets into the wild and unpleasant history I had between WinPE and DARCIE.

The Pentium 4 Prescott was way faster than its Willamette counterparts that I discovered later on but no idea how it stacks up to Northwood.
It was the entire reason I went straight to water cooling in 2004 and was still a space heater. I don't miss it. It's the reason I will never buy Intel.
Also, I'm still fast af boiii!

Prescott, was a disaster, made worse because cooling solutions at the time were not ready to handle the thermals, resulting in loud baseline computing. I remember using an OEM Prescott machine at the time (Dell, perhaps), and just using basic Windows, you could hear the CPU fan ramp up and down constantly. And it was a pitchy fan note.

As a day 1 water cooler it was NOT the CPU fan, it was the PSU. You could hear it pitch down whenever Prescott was pinned 50% (lol, HT).
That machine must have lunched half a dozen power supplies between 420-700W before I finally retired it for good.
The load spikes were that dangerous and I remember them well. Intel really shipped a product like that and called it good.

 

[Endymio]

You mean this junk? ....it was NOT the CPU fan, it was the PSU...
That machine must have lunched half a dozen power supplies between 420-700W before I finally retired it for good.
The load spikes were that dangerous and I remember them well. Intel really shipped a product like that and called it good.

Pro tip for you: Intel doesn't make nor ship PSUs. And Northwood and Prescott were both the best CPUs you could get at the time. A family member is still using my old Prescott machine -- with its original PSU intact.

 

[eidairaman1]

The weirdest part about that era I remember was that Windows and MS office menu drop-down animations were smooth on Pentium but horribly laggy on Athlon XP/64

Hmm never had that problem

Wonder how badly XP would've ran with a Pentium/K6 @ 233MHz

I'd say that a P4 2GHz/AXP 2000+ & 512MB RAM was the real minimum for non-sluggish usage.

The K6 Handled XP fine,

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

I remember the pentium IV. Hot as hell, didnt need a heater in my room during the winter. Framerates in games like supreme commander or sins of a solar empire rarely went over 20 and frequently were single digits.

Then a basic core 2 duo first gen came along and obliterated that old northwood. Recycled that PC the first chance I could.

I have nothing but good memories of my Northwood 2.4, which I used at work from 2003 until 2015 for non-demanding development work. Fast and cool (and I had a C2D at home to compare), and it ran Office 2010 perfectly well. The entire PC consumed 65 W at idle, which at the time was considered frugal.

Considering that athlons pulled less then 65W at full tilt, pulling 65w at idle sound absolutely disastrous. And calling a northwood "fast" compared to a core 2 duo is......LOL.

Some desktop P4 CPUs were even used in notebooks, although I don't remember which ones, and at what clocks.

They were incredibly hot, slow, and LOUD DTRs, not really "notebooks". AMD mobile parts destroyed them overall.

 

[Aken Bosch]

Off topic just a bit.

Funny story from that era (well, just a bit) - some smart a** from sales managed to get an order for about 100+ PC's. The problem was that he sold AMD on slot A with Intel boards on slot 1. The drones in production didn't noticed anything wrong, as usual. Chaos ins sued after all the PC's were assembled and all had gone the way of the dodo (they were mentally challenged and didn't ring a bell at all after the first batch of 10 or so). Laughed my ass off for 2 weeks and still remember it.

Also, a PSU exploded at 20 cm from my head, on the service desk beside me. I had to take 3 days off from that to recover from the shock itself.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

starts getting fast at 4ghz I guess.

 

[Endymio]

I remember the pentium IV. Hot as hell, didnt need a heater in my room .... Considering that athlons pulled less then 65W at full tilt, pulling 65w at idle sound absolutely disastrous. And calling a northwood "fast" compared to a core 2 duo is......LOL. They were incredibly hot, slow, and LOUD DTRs, not really "notebooks"

Um, the non-extreme version of Northwood pulled 65W max -- the mobile version 35W. And you're trying to compare the performance of Northwood to a CPU released 2 generations later? Were you serious with that or just clowning around for a laugh?

 

[stickleback123]

I always hated using a P4 system in period, and I had to use a lot in work. They always felt laggy and sluggish and unresponsive, the early ones very much so but even the later Pentium D models were not very pleasant.

Any Athlon XP or Athlon 64 felt like a rocket in comparison.

I actually still have a socket 423 wilamette P4 with RAMBUS memory in the attic! I kept it because who doesn't love a loser.

 

[unwind-protect]

Hyperthreading made Pentium 4 feel pleasant for interactive us.

But it also was the age of Opterons and other AMD64 CPUs, which had a real advantage for all uses.

 

[68Olds]

starts getting fast at 4ghz I guess.

View attachment 387604

And a little faster @ 4.2GHz. lol
This was on s478. The stupid Abit IC7-g has a 250MHz FSB bug. It wouldn't boot 1:1 at 250 & using a divider killed SPi times.

 

[Aken Bosch]

Um, the non-extreme version of Northwood pulled 65W max -- the mobile version 35W. And you're trying to compare the performance of Northwood to a CPU released 2 generations later? Were you serious with that or just clowning around for a laugh?

Athlon - 23.06.1999. Athlon XP was released on 14.05.2001;

Pentium 4 - 20.11.2000. Northwood version release date- 23.06.2003.

What are you babbling about?

 

[stickleback123]

I ran a pair of gallatin Xeons (3.2GHz, 2MB L3 cache, the core that they used for the first Pentium 4 Extreme Edition) in a Supermicro X5-DAL motherboard with a handful of Cheetah 15K drives as my home PC for a couple of years. Dual channel memory so the RAM bandwidth matched the FSB was essential for decent performance from a P4, the early single channel DDR and god forbid SDR chipsets made for really rubbish PCs.

PCs at the time were unresponsive, miserable things and those were the lengths I went to for a remotely pleasant experience. Proper dual core CPUs (Athlon 64 x2 and Conroe) along with WD Raptors made modest desktop PCs usable, but it was SSDs that changed it forever.

I always thought the reviewers were too kind to the P4. They could perform well in certain benchmarks but to actually use they were consistently miles off AMD systems at the time.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

And a little faster @ 4.2GHz. lol
This was on s478. The stupid Abit IC7-g has a 250MHz FSB bug. It wouldn't boot 1:1 at 250 & using a divider killed SPi times.

View attachment 387608

That was a thing for sure. Lot of boards walled before the cpu. Made it agrevating.

Almost like the s754 I'm running now. But the CPU just walls at 2.6ghz. And its hard to find good chips any more.

It was all about binning back then. Figure out the fastest ram. Best boards and of course cpu steppings.

 

[Marcus L]

Wonder how badly XP would've ran with a Pentium/K6 @ 233MHz

I'd say that a P4 2GHz/AXP 2000+ & 512MB RAM was the real minimum for non-sluggish usage.

I was only getting into computers a couple of years before xp was released and before building my first custom one I put xp on a compaq deskpro with a Pentium 2 CPU, I think it was either 333mhz or possibly 450, it's hard to recall after so many years, though imo at the time it ran well when I upgraded the ram to 256mb lol though the Athlon 1900+ machine I built after that completely blew it out of the water, that was my first build and have had the bug ever since..

 

[Apocalypsee]

My Athlon 64 ran miles around any Pentium 4 at lower clocks and producing much less heat.

I think what you're describing is the effect of owning only one PC, being happy with its performance, and having nothing else to compare it to except for your own needs.

It's not just Athlon 64, the little guy Sempron also run miles around it. I got Northwood 2GHz that clocked at 3GHz that run slower than Sempron 2500+ s754 which only clocked at 1.4GHz, no joke. I still like Pentium 4 though because how Intel marketed it so damn well on every single media back then (magazine, TV ads etc.) that it's easily available during s478 era (also available in wide range of RAM; DDR, SDRAM, RD RAM and various chipsets from Intel themself, VIA, SiS) that I still fond of it despite it's flaws.

Pentium 4 for retro gaming PC running XP is indeed very light, but also run very hot especially Prescott. Northwood is fine IMO performance and temperature wise, for late 90's to early 2000 games that is.

 

[_roman_]

even typing text has a delay compared to Linux or W7

I dislike generic statements.

Not every linux kernel was build for performance. Not every Desktop Envrionment, DE, is fast. DE = graphical user interface for the graphical X-Server so you can use your webbrowser, spreadsheet, music software and such with a mouse. Not in text mode of course.

KDE and Gnome Desktop environment are especially bloated and slow.

You may try a slim Desktop Environment with bare minimum first. I do use the same windows key combinations from Windows XP for certain tasks.
my config file for i3wm.org has only a few lines. Only a few functionality. I do not need the 80% more feature e.g. Windows 11 pro 24h2 deliveres for a working computer for the basic task to do work. the browser and spreadsheet and text program and text editor are the same. The file system does not really matter. I also see it quite easily on the RAM usage for a Desktop Environment. Or the packages which have to be build from scratch for certain Desktop Environments.

 

[DaemonForce]

That was a thing for sure. Lot of boards walled before the cpu. Made it agrevating.

Ya'll running 4GHz on Prescott? I comfy clocked 3.3 and maxxed 3.6 (unstable).
Mushkin memory once again giving everyone the shaft. I learned after Phenom II.

Pentium 4 for retro gaming PC running XP is indeed very light, but also run very hot especially Prescott.

It's unreasonable until going into the bios and manually throttling as much as possible. In my case up to 75%.
Even then USB support was shaky and needed. Pentium MMX, K6-2, Pentium 4...I cut my teeth on ALL of this.

KDE and Gnome Desktop environment are especially bloated and slow.

Do you have any old copies of Knoppix or Damn Small? KDE now is in no way like KDE back then.

 

[Shihab]

At least this will help with a hacking threat.

The pen is actually not mightier than the sword, especially when it involves "hacking."

 

[pavle]

I wouldn't say over-engineered; it only had 2 pipelines, Athlon (K7) had 3 and the P4 FPU was really slow - only MMX path was fast/er.
Here are some results to compare (all ran with HWinfo32 v4.26.2020 - benchmark):

P4C 2800MHz (Northwood_HT) on i845 Cedar Mill 3200MHz (P4 641) on i865 Pentium Dual Core E5300 (Wolfdale 2M) 2600MHz on i865
CPU: 14684 CPU: 31116 CPU: 63597
FPU: 7346 FPU: 8683 FPU: 40847
MMX: 16635 MMX: 25597 MMX: 75122
Memory 1314MB/s (DDR1 400) Memory: 2045MB/s (DDR1 400 Dual) Memory: 2140MB/s (DDR1 400 Dual channel)


 

[R-T-B]

XP even ran OK with a Pentium MMX 233, provided you had a decent amount of RAM for the time, like 128-256 MB range

I had that. It only went to hell some years down the line when Windows Update needed to stick around for like half-hour calculating which updates you needed (because it seemed to run through every single KB ever, calculating dependencies, superseded updates and such).

Yeah depends on the service pack of course, but even by the end of its life I remember running it quasi effectively on a 400ish MHz Pentium II lol.

Um, the non-extreme version of Northwood pulled 65W max -- the mobile version 35W. And you're trying to compare the performance of Northwood to a CPU released 2 generations later? Were you serious with that or just clowning around for a laugh?

He's probably remembering the post-northwood monsters. Prescot?

Sandybridge will be their crowning achievement. My 2600K ran 1Ghz over stock 24/7 never once complained stayed cool couldn’t ask for anything more

For me it was Westmere or Nehalem... of course thats because its what I had at the time (for a very long time as it were). YMMV.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I actually still have a socket 423 wilamette P4 with RAMBUS memory in the attic! I kept it because who doesn't love a loser.

We know it didn’t sell at eBay auction, but I like your version better!