Project: Retro Pentium 4

[Deleted member 41019]

Might have some more stuff for you later on

I am finding the max oc on the cpu and gpu's, then i'm gonna bench this beast! Might use my HD3850AGP as well x)

EDIT: Got 15118 3DM 2003 with my X850XT PE, was not expecting to be that much faster than your HD3650...


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That looks a little beast! Also I spy a large cooler there for the CPU....

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

That looks a little beast! Also I spy a large cooler there for the CPU....

That is the Scythe Andy Samurai Master it keeps the 3.4GHz (oced to 3.62) extreme edition Gallatin core quite cool under load. I had to mod the brackets with a dremel a a pair of pliers, it would not fit due to interference with the abit otes. Also the chipset cooler (thermalright extreme spirit) has like 1mm gap to both the gpu and the cpu cooler. It was a pain to get everything properly assembled... I think I will do a separate thread.
Btw you retro build turned out to be quite cool everything so tidy and clean Mine won't look as clean, also my paint job is kinda messy x)

 

[Pentium4dude]

While some build old P4 systems just for fun, I still use my P4 system that I bought back in 2004 everyday as my main rig because it is faster for gaming than my Core i3 2365M laptop (because of terrible Intel HD graphics and in single thread performance, the P4 still comes very close to an 1.5 Ghz core i3)

Here are the specs:

Pentium 4 2.4C overclocked to 3.2 Ghz with 1066 Mhz FSB (130nm Northwood Hyper threading, stock cooler, no Vcore increase, run overclocked since 2006)
Abit IC7 Motherboard
2x 512 MB Corsair XMS 3200 DDR 400 (1 GB in dual channel 2.5-3-3-7 )
Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT 256 MB AGP
2x 80 GB HDD in RAID 0 (Seagate 7200 RPM SATA-I)
Soundblaster X-Fi XtremeMusic PCI
Windows XP SP3

I still use it for web browsing and development, and even runs some modern games surprisingly well (games like Counter Strike GO, League of Legends, Minecraft, even more heavy ones like Skyrim, Dirt2, Civilization 5 and Tomb Raider are playable on the lowest settings

Here is some advice and interesting stuff i learned over the years:

-Replace that HD 3650 with an Nvidia Geforce 6/7 series GPU (believe it or not, my 7600 GT is a lot faster than your current GPU, going above a 6800/7800 GT is useless because the CPU will bottleneck anything better than it (unless you enable high Anti aliasing) and DX 10 and above GPU´s have compatibility problems with some old games, avoid ATI/AMD cards for retro games, AGP is preferred and there really is no difference between PCI express and AGP in performance, avoid using anything above Windows XP, getting a CRT 4:3 monitor would be ideal for this kind of stuff together with a nice EAX sound card like a creative Audigy2 or X-Fi.

- The 90nm cores may have higher clock speeds and bigger L2 caches, but they are actually slower than the 130nm cores (save for some newer software that uses SSE3 and are optimized for hyper threading) due to high cache latency and long pipeline, they also use more power, the 130 nm Extreme edition clocked at 3.4 Ghz has shown to be faster than the 3.73 Ghz 90nm EE, anyways extreme editions are rare and expensive.

- Hyper threading on these CPU´s is pretty much useless, and on the 130nm cores it can actually reduce performance and increase temperatures, on 90nm it got some small improvements and can give a very small performance boost when running multiple different heavy programs, still most threaded programs and games dont get any benefit from it so disable it to increase compatibility with old software, specially so if you overclock.

- P4´s seems to be sensitive to things like overclocking the FSB, getting dual channel memory and reducing memory latency , these improve performance a lot unlike in modern systems where these things only have a tiny impact. Also try to get a motherboard with 875P chipset, these have things like PAT that improve memory latency and impact performance.

- To put P4 cpus performance in perspective, a 3 Ghz P4 gets about the same performance as a Core 2 Duo 1.8/1.9 Ghz CPU with 1 core disabled and uses more power (The Core 2 was really a huge leap forward, not unlike in modern days where performance and prices do not improve in 6 years.
But surprisingly a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 still trounces an Intel Atom 1.8 Ghz dual core in single thread, and gets defeated by a small margin in some multi threaded tests even with 1 core, to think that these pathetic Atom CPUs are still in use for laptops and tablets in 2015 is scary.
Even more scary is that a 3.3 Ghz Pentium 4 has about the same single thread performance as the Playstation 4 CPU (check the cinebench single thread benchmarks if you dont believe me)

-P4 are as low as you can go to run modern software and web browsing, tons of programs refuse to install on AthlonXPs and Pentium 3 CPU´s due to lack of SSE2 (which is extremely widespread unlike SSE3/4 even tough these CPU´s have better clock for clock performance than P4´s) and systems prior to P4s used SDRAM and slow IDE hard drives which make things really slow and unresponsive.
Still Win7 and browsing with few tabs is quite smooth on these old systems as long as you have 800 Mhz FSB and more than 1 GB of RAM, AFAIK you cannot install Windows 8 and 10 on these, due to drivers compatibility and lack of certain CPU features.

- This P4 system costed about 2000$ or more back in 2004, then in 2007 my brother bought a Pentium Dual Core system with 3 GB of RAM and a fast GPU for about 500$ (and that dual core overclocked from 1.8 Ghz to 3 Ghz) that system offered more than 3x the performance and costed 3x less only in 3 years time and used less power,.the performance and the feeling of smoothness was staggering, it points out nicely that purchasing high end parts is always a bad idea.

 

[Gaetano77]

I also still use a Pentium 4 PC bought in April 2004; here are specs:

- CPU Intel Pentium 4 3.00 Ghz (Prescott core - SL7PM) overclocked to 3.40 Ghz (227x15)
- MoBo Asus P4P800 Deluxe socket 478
- RAM 2 Gb (1x2) G.Skill DDR400 (F1-3200PHU2-2GBNS) running in dual channel mode (2.5-3-3-7)
- VGA AGP ATI Radeon Sapphire 9600 256 Mb
- HDD SATA Seagate Barracuda 120 Gb 7200 rpm

Operating systems: Windows XP SP3, Windows 7 Professional (32-bit) and Windows 8.1 Pro (32-bit)

This machine is perfect for Office work (with MS Office 2003 and Office 2007 Compatibility Pack), light web browsing (with Google Chrome) and playing DVD-Video and music (with Media Player Classic); on YouTube it is possible to play all streaming videos at middle-resolution (360/480p) and even few at 720p ones without stuttering.

This CPU doesn't officially support Windows 8.1 operating system because lack of NX-bit feature, but i succeeded to install it anyway modifying original ISO with W8CPUFeathure Patch; the procedure is explained here:

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/th...e-Patch-(Bypass-Windows-8-CPU-feature-checks)

 

[Deleted member 41019]

Well some sad news but also good news!

The motherboard decided it no longer liked electricity and has died but (here is the good news) I am replacing it with a Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G Rev 4.0.

I also took the time while the system is having to come apart to replace the old front intake fans with the same ones as the rear. We are now sporting two new Arctic Cooling 'F8' series fans. They really stand out at the front of the system

Here are some pictures of the replacement (Warning: may not be in order):

 

[Deleted member 41019]

And the new motherboard is in.

Here are the specs for those who want to know: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=1863#ov

Also stay tuned for a big update as a major component is going to be replaced very soon!!

Picture time!

 

[Deleted member 41019]

Well here it is the big update!

I have replaced the ATI HD3650 with a X1950pro.

The card is much, much better in damn near all ways. My old 3dmark03 score of around 9k (it's in this thread somewhere) was smashed when I took this for a quick spin at stock speeds and got 14.8k. That's a HUGE change right there.

The one thing I am sorry to report is that XP seems to be unstable so I am in the process of repairing the system, I'll then test overclocks and report back with a screenshot of the score and a side-by-side of the specs for the two GPUs.

Last thing: (as I'm typing this at 22:44pm on the 31/12/2015) Happy new year to all!

 

[TRWOV]

The only real upgrades over an X1950PRO are the HD4670 and HD3850.

 

[Deleted member 41019]

The only real upgrades over an X1950PRO are the HD4670 and HD3850.

Agreed and to be honest it's getting hard to find them. There is also the fact I really dont want to spend £££ for a card only slightly better then this now.

This project got quite out of hand really. It was only ment to be a system to play my old 2000/XP era games on and soon became "let's see how far I can push an AGP system with a 478" as well as "let's see how far I can push my other half when it comes to wasting money on an out of date PC" lol

My other half has been great though and supportive of the project so I thank her a lot

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

I finished my P4 build as well! (specs on the side)

 

[TRWOV]

wow, nice case.... I might cut a window into mine

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

wow, nice case.... I might cut a window into mine

That is exactly what I did!

 

[Jesse Ricard]

Working on my P4 system. Though I'm sure it could use a some better parts, it would be nice if it was worth what my friends dad paid for back in the day

 

[Jesse Ricard]

got my p4 retro tribute rig complete and close to setup how it should have been for its price when my friends dad bought it
specs:
Pentium 4 prescott 3.0 ghz rev C0 S478 1MB l2 800mhzfsb
Gigabyte GA-8IG1000MK rev 2.0
2GB Samsung DDR 400 cl2 (4x512MB)
ASUS v9570 FX5700 ultra 256MB agp 8x
Soundblaster Audigy2 pci
Seagate barracuda 7200.9 SATA 160 GB
Coolmax Retail+ 465W PSU (looks cool)
unknown beige chassis with a couple of led I have added
color theme is blue beige grey and brass for now but once I got a few bucks for paint and put a window in the case will paint the beige (pentium blue n orange maybe)

 

[Deleted member 41019]

got my p4 retro tribute rig complete and close to setup how it should have been for its price when my friends dad bought it
specs:
Pentium 4 prescott 3.0 ghz rev C0 S478 1MB l2 800mhzfsb
Gigabyte GA-8IG1000MK rev 2.0
2GB Samsung DDR 400 cl2 (4x512MB)
ASUS v9570 FX5700 ultra 256MB agp 8x
Soundblaster Audigy2 pci
Seagate barracuda 7200.9 SATA 160 GB
Coolmax Retail+ 465W PSU (looks cool)
unknown beige chassis with a couple of led I have added
color theme is blue beige grey and brass for now but once I got a few bucks for paint and put a window in the case will paint the beige (pentium blue n orange maybe)

That's awesome

Do you want some advice with that board? I had the same one at the start of this project in perfect order but the heat put out by the CPU has cooked the VRM Caps near the CPU socket. Keep a VERY close eye on them and invest in the biggest cooler you can with a copper base.

I may repair my GA-8IG1000MK in the future but for now it stays dead in the loft.
GA-8IG1000MKG
GA-8IG1000MK
GA-8IG1000MK
GA-8IG1000MK

 

[Jesse Ricard]

yes i remember you saying something about that one of the reasons i tie wired on the primecooler hyper cool 4 copper heat sync only have the s462 mounting hardware for it but it really needed to be in this build its a tired old mobo w many hours so i wont have it on often (tribute to late friend)

 

[viniraupp]

Hi Guys, Im from Brazil. Sorry my bad english.

Im glad I found you guys on the internet.

I started my P4 478 project.

The old (and the new too... ) components are hard to find here. Very hard to find a decent 478 P4. Im still looking...

I already bought the motherboard and memory.

Next week will buy a HD3850.

Do you know if a modern SSD (Kingston 60GB) will work with this motherboard? (Windows XP)


Soyo Dragon 2 P4I875P:

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

Hi Guys, Im from Brazil. Sorry my bad english.

Im glad I found you guys on the internet.

I started my P4 478 project.

The old (and the new too... ) components are hard to find here. Very hard to find a decent 478 P4. Im still looking...

I already bought the motherboard and memory.

Next week will buy a HD3850.

Do you know if a modern SSD (Kingston 60GB) will work with this motherboard? (Windows XP)


Soyo Dragon 2 P4I875P:

It seems that some of us have a thing for the old 478 platform (Nostalgia it is xD)!

Do you have a case and psu already? We need more details!!!

 

[viniraupp]

It seems that some of us have a thing for the old 478 platform (Nostalgia it is xD)!

Do you have a case and psu already? We need more details!!!

hahahahahaha
YES, nostalgia is the answer...

I have no idea for a case yet. =[
I want a new one but old school style...
PSU I will use a 500W Corsair.

Now my goal is to find a decent P4 .

 

[viniraupp]

I finished my P4 build as well! (specs on the side)


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haaaaaaa... I want a Abit IC7 Max3 toooooooooo!!!!!!
I searched everywhere here in Brazil but dont found .

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

haaaaaaa... I want a Abit IC7 Max3 toooooooooo!!!!!!
I searched everywhere here in Brazil but dont found .

They are incredibly hard to find! This is the one that I have originally bought back in 2004, even in those days it was not easy to get hold off one! I had it paired with P4 3.2E running at 4GHz under water for almost 10 years no problem at all! Don't you envy the P4 3.4 Extreme Edition Gallatin aswell? Those are the best of the best for socket 478!

 

[viniraupp]

They are incredibly hard to find! This is the one that I have originally bought back in 2004, even in those days it was not easy to get hold off one! I had it paired with P4 3.2E running at 4GHz under water for almost 10 years no problem at all! Don't you envy the P4 3.4 Extreme Edition Gallatin aswell? Those are the best of the best for socket 478!

hahahaha

I've lost hope to find a P4 Extreme Edition... I wii be happy to find "normal" P4 3.4GHz (no E.E.)

Abit, Epox, DFI, Soltek, Soyo, Aopen, Biostar were the best 10 or 15 years ago....

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

hahahaha

I've lost hope to find a P4 Extreme Edition... I wii be happy to find "normal" P4 3.4GHz (no E.E.)

Abit, Epox, DFI, Soltek, Soyo, Aopen, Biostar were the best 10 or 15 years ago....

The Asus P4C800E-Deluxe is also one beast of a motherboard!

You will find those cpu's for cheap on ebay! Will you go Northwood or Prescott?

 

[P4-630]

I still have a Northwood Celeron 2.0GHz laying around somewhere from my first laptop, but I believe the socket is a little different.

 

[R00kie]

I still have a Northwood Celeron 2.0GHz laying around somewhere from my first laptop, but I believe the socket is a little different.

The socket is electrically different, to be exact, even though it might have the same number of pins.