The attraction of the Pentium III is that the boards usually come with soundcard friendly ISA slots (esp. if its a 440BX board) and usually work in DOS with PCI cards. The downside of Pentium 4 era hardware is that it usually has problems with caps and runs much hotter.
I was just about to throw away my PIII and P4 machines both sitting in a basement for approx 10+ years. But thanks to you Phil. Your videos inspired me to take care of them and PIII 1Ghz is already running based on VIA chipset MB with FC-PGA socket, with a great SB LIVE! 5.1, with 3DLabs Oxygene VX1 workstation graphics and 10GB oldschool Qunatum HDD. Everything works liek it was yesterday... damn that's nostalgic ;)
A Dell Dimension 4550 is what I use for my Win98 setup. With a 2.8GHz P4 and Radeon 9600XT, it's plenty fast for just about anything you can throw at it.
Cool, I used to have a Dell Dimension 4550, as well. My father used to work as a custodian, so they were getting rid of some Dell machines. My father salvaged a Dell Dimension 4550, and I used to do all sorts of modifications to it. I even installed Windows 98, in the system. I also bought different Geforce cards, for the system. The video card I used for the system, was a Geforce4 Ti 4600. It was a really good video card, and I would get around 11,000 3DMark scores, with both 3DMark 2000 and 2001 SE. Forgot to mention that the system had a 2 GHz CPU. Last year, I had to throw the system away because the capacitors capsized on the motherboard. I salvaged some good parts, from the system, before I threw it away. I plan on buying another Dell DImension 4550 from Ebay, one of these days. I would like to this time, slap in an Aureal Vortex 2 sound card (for A3D and classic SB Pro emulation) and a Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS sound card, as well as reinstall the Geforce4 Ti 4600 inside the PC.
I love your Channel the down side is I now regret getting rid of my Compaq PC rocking a celeron 1300 Tualatin core, I still have alot of my retro gear I refuse to Recycle mostly cause like your channel I LOVE tinkering hehe :D keep up the great work :D
I did something similar, mainly just with parts I had lying around. P4 3.2 GHz, GeForce 6800 Ultra, and an Audigy 2 ZS. Now my setup has no DOS sound support, but I’m building a different machine for that. For Win98 gaming I’m happy with it.
The advantage of using SiS chipsets on the Socket 478 platform is that some boards have universal AGP slots, which allows you to run something like a Voodoo5.
One other nice thing is that you actually can have sound effects working under DOS with a Yamaha YMF7x4 PCI without any TSR. (At least if your southbridge is a 962 or older.)
Great video! Look at that yucky P4 IPC. xD And even when the P4 wins, I'm just way too much of a Pentium iii fanboy to care! And if I wanted newer, I'd definitely go with an Athlon, not the P4.
I found a Compaq Evo N600c at a thrift for around $5 US. It was designed for Win2k/NT but there were drivers for Win98. Because of your videos that's the route I picked. It's got a Tualitin based P III-M @1200 MHz and a RADEONX600 with a absurd (for the time) 1400x1050 resolution and is shaping up to be a nice Win98/DOS gaming system.
X600 is what both Windows and CPU-Z ID the card as but it appears to be a ATI Mobility Radeon w 16 MB DDR SDRAM. I had trouble finding Windows 98 drivers that would even work but wrong ID aside, 3D acceleration seems to work fine.The sound card is even a SB compatible so I've got sound effects and music for DOS titles like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D
I prefer the pentium III 1400. I have one and its super fast. Its more rewarding for me having a TOP Pentium III area machine than having a cheap pentium IV. It feels more correct for me, especially considering Windows 9x. For me, pentium IV is for Windows XP only. Pentium III is for Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP.
AGree on that. Like to have atleast somewhat period correct hardware. A fast P3 for 98 SE, a Pen4 around 2.4-3.2 GHz for the high-end singlecore range. Or an Athlon with a similar rating. Then a Fast Core 2 for the late XP era.
yeah... but are too strange and expensive Tualatin motherboards, i have 2 pc for retro gaming, a pentium 3 800mhz for windows 98 and msdos, and a pentium 4 3.4 ghz for 32 bit xp games
What motherboard you got? I have an ASUS TUV4x (on of the best in 2000) and 1ghz Pentium 3 Coppermine. Any chance you know anyone on ebay selling a 1.4 Pentium 3 ?
Thank you for putting the power Draw figures for the Pentium 4. The Power Draw is for some reason a thing that is of Major concern for me. Other than the heat and Power usage and Capacitor reliability, I think Pentium 4's make Great Budget windows 98 Machines. Even The Socket 478 Celerons are Pretty good For Older games. even though i'm more for authentic hardware like Slot 1 and Socket 7, I can't deny how Easy Pentium 4's are to retro fit for Windows 98 Games. As long as you keep them cool and use decent cooling solutions you should Be fine. Another thing to mention is that i think Pentium 4's Aren't Suited As well for Windows XP gaming as they are For 98 Games
That Tualatin really held its own in these tests! I own a dual 1.4 ghz S-Tualatin server. It was a real beast in its day. I have built a few of these P4 win 98 game rigs and they work very well. Cheap and reliable. You should really make a video about the Pentium pro if you havent already
I would set up whatever can use most modern parts, while cheap and available and at the same time let me enjoy the most quantity of games with great stability! A P4 seems like a great choice! The only way I would set up a fast P3 is if already have all the parts. Nice work as always!
I remember playing Delta Force Land Warrior on the go with my Pentium M laptop, then coming home and playing it on my Pentium 4 machine. It's such a great game. There are even some multiplayer servers still online
The PIII 1.4 would demolish the P4. Intel had shifted strategy with Netburst and released a weaker architecture because they thought they could make up for it with raw clock speeds. We all see how that turned out.
As usual, excellent video. I've actually been using some kind of industrial P4 board with ISA. Sound cards work great in it for the most part: SBPro2 was not compatible, YMF719 DMA was weird so sound effects didn't always play correctly, but my Sound Blaster 16 and 32 cards all worked great in it. Unfortunately, I have to keep it in 400mhz FSB mode or the board simply will not boot, but I have achieved 2.6ghz in this thing. Way overkill for DOS, naturally :) But it was super cheap to build! RAM, CPU, all easy to find.
There are some nice option for ms dos sound - yamaha ymf724-based soud card. It has SB-Link (aka PC-PCI) port, which is actually GPIO port. I've seen some modern industrial mobos based on skylake/kaby lake with PCI slot and 8-bit GPIO port. I believe that it is possibile to use that port to transfer some useful data (irq, dma). But need some programming
Nice video about the Pentium III and IV comparisons. I am planning on making my own retro gaming computer one day (I used to have two old computers, one with Pentium III and one with Pentium 4 HT which both gone now) and after watching this video I am going to find old retro PC parts.
I’m a big fan of these myself, my favorite part is the chipset. Everyone hates it so much that great stable motherboards can be had for pretty much nothing.
Some may have already mentioned this in the comments but just in case... For your SoundBlaster sound, have a look on both your motherboard and sound card for a pin header labelled 'SB_LNK' or similar. The address ranges that PCI devices use doesn't work too well when mapping to the I/O addresses that ISA used, so PCI sound cards had issues mapping to 220h in a real mode environment. If both your sound card and motherboard have those connectors, connect them up, that will sort out the I/O problem. Many motherboards/sound cards of that era had the connector as it was a 'thing' at the time, many people wouldn't to a PCI sound card for that reason. It might be something that they found a work around for with some boards, I can remember having loads of systems that didn't need an SB link cable and their audio worked fine.
my first P4 was a 2.6Ghz TH 800mhz FSB chip. it was FAST for its day! i even started playing World of Warcraft on that with a 6600GT i got lucky and scored 3GB of ram for it a guy i know that worked in IT gave them to me in 2003 that was like winning the lottery... had to get a E8400 with a 8800GTS to play wow as some point..
When I remember my 2.66 GHz P4 nothing good comes out of it. Well it was faster than what I had before, but nowadays I'd rather take a Celeron 420 insteadl.
I have to say, you are one of the few people I have seen that has had little to no issues with Jetway motherboards. My roommate used to own a computer store, and he would sell computers built with Jetway boards, but we had issues with more of them than we did with most other motherboards we sold. That said, before he moved on from his computer shop, the most stable boards we sold were MSI boards, but for some reason, one particular run of AMD motherboards with Nvidia chipsets, we had more issues with those, and it was a motherboard that, up to that point, we had never had any issues with. We had several warranty claims, he even replaced boards on the affected computers a few times with the same board, only to have the computer come back yet again. In the end, what it turned out to be was not a problem with the boards, but with the new revision of the bios, which had a setting that, by default, made the boards act stupid. Once he found this issue, he went through every computer he had built with those, and changed the bios setting that was causing the issues, and we stopped having those issues.
I had build my retroPC with P4 2GHz (easy to find today) and it works very well with Windows 98 and DOS in all retro games. For DOS sound i bought Creative SB Live! 5.1 for 8$ which have DOS driver and it works well. Built-In AC97 sound don't have native SB support and its easier to buy SB card instead of try to configure AC97. And i tryed GeForce 6600 and GeForce Ti4200 and last has better compatibility for old games. This video was interesting for me for comparing my build with your results. Specs i'm using is: MB: Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G on i865PE CPU: P4 Northwood 2GHz RAM: 2 x 256MB DDR @266MHz DualChannel Video: ASUS GeForce Ti4200 AGP8X 128MB 3D Accelerator: 2 x 3DFx Voodoo 2 12MB @ SLI Sound: Creative Live! 5.1 HDD: IDE Seagate Barracuda 40GB + IDE Seagate Barracuda 80GB PSU: Thermaltake TR2 600W
I've got a couple of old Dell P4 machines here. Should probably get around to mucking around with repairing them and installing windows 98 SE on them. Pretty sure most of them just need new hard drives and a sound card. Might have 1 or 2 that needs a motherboard recap, but I run an electronics repair shop, so that's not exactly difficult.
IMO the best pentium 4, socket 478 is (2.8ghz 800mhz FSB 512), as the TDP is 69.7 compaired to 87-103 for the 3.0/3.2/3.4. it is fast enough for any windows 98/dos game Unreal 2004, Tribes vengeance etc, lower heat so less fans needed and still can support Dos Via ICH5 also just about removes then need for a xp retro system.
AMD K7 3000+ forever! Fanboyism aside, i haven't checked prices yet what can be gotten cheaper, but back then AMD beat the crap out of the P4s with its K7 XP CPUs. A 2000+ had around 10% more power at 1/3 the price when compared to a P4-2000 back then.
I conquer with using the 865 chipset. It works great for windows 98. And if you get an Asus enthusiest board or similar brand, the performance can be varied somewhat to suet ones needs. It is really cheap to find a low end northwood or Willamette celeron, and swap it out with a Prescott should you want a wide performance range in one machine. Even using single channel 266 mhz ram to dual channel 400 makes the performance very a lot, especially when taking the celeron vs htp4 into account.
MoHAA ftw! Remember having an AMD thunderbird 1ghz, went to an p4 with an 9800.. finally getting 40-60fps on the map bridge on 1024 res! was epic experience!
I reacently (finnaly!) got my obscure dual socket Opteron workstation based retro gaming PC. Specs are. Dual AMD Opteron 250 CPUs (2.6Ghz) server version of the FX-55 but only cost $14 each :D MB Fujitsu-Siemens D1692-Bxx (still supported on Fujitsu's site, bios, drivers, manual etc..) 16Gb of DDR400 ECC Audigy 2 ZS AGP 8x BFG branded nvidia 6800 Ultra Integrated broadcom Gb ethernet IDE DVD drive IDE 500Gb Hitachi CinemaStar New EVGA 430W semi modular PSU I had all kinds of issues trying to get an OS to work on it. XP worked sort of except it was limted to 3ish GB of ram and I could not get the Audigy 2 ZS to work correctly regardless of driver, same issue with win2k 98SE and win 7 on another PC with this card. Had to use 3rd part drivers with reduced functionality. In the end i got a copy of win 2k3 server standard x64 edition and my god is it a great OS, everything installed out of the box and even nvidia supported driver up to version 307.xx with AGP support and 64bit. Newest 32 bit on XP was 175 or there abouts, anything newer did not support AGP, let alone 64 bit. Not only that, the standard XP drivers from creative for XP worked out of the box on 64 bit 2k3 server lol, and ever worked correctly for the first time. Go figure! creative don't even support this OS so got me beat how it ended up working better than the supported OSs Result are epic! plays all my old 1999-2004 games and really high performance. My next project with this system is to laser cut some custom brackets to adapt Noctua NH-9US coolers as they are meant for socket AM2 and newer but AM2 have 4 mounting holes where socket 940 has 2 holes slightly closer to the CPU. The stock server coolers are like jet engines.
Yeah 2k3 server is great, I like it as its much like my other fav being win2k and the fact everything works out of the box (hardware/driver wise) is nice. I have a question actually. Is there a way to disable in 2k3 the reason prompt when shutting down? So that it is a bit more desktop friendly. It always asks what the reason for shutting down is which is kinda annoying. Also is there something that blocks the installation of 3rd part browsers? a policy maybe? as I can't get any of the popular browser installers to start. they just do nothing when doubled clicked or run as admin. I even tried old versions of FF, chrome and opera that state support for 2k3 64 and XP 64 but they also don't start.
Thanks heaps for that. I was aware of the windows component that needs to be removed to use IE, but I didn't think that would effect installing other browsers. I will try it out and see if it fixes it. yeah win2k I was using up until 2006 or so. I gave XP heaps of goes but it was always causing me issues with stability over the few systems I had, so I always revered back to 2k. Then vista came out and I loved it. it ran great on my 4 core AMD with 2 way SLI 9800GTXs and 8Gb ram, that was in 2008. I ran vista ultimate X64 and I had 0 issues despite people saying it was bad. In fact I was able to play some games for the first time since win 98 as I could not get them to work on 2k or XP for years of trying but vista worked out of the box, go figure.
Disabling the shutdown event tracker worked nicely. Thanks for the tip. However removing IE enhanced security component from windows didn't help, in either installing another browser or running the included IE6. In IE it now complains that the enhanced security is not installed and stops me from loading any sites. FF, chrome and Opera still fail to start the installer. Same split sec hourglass on the pointer and then nothing. Have no idea why?
Out of curiosity after i seen this video: Over 1,5 years ago you made a big shootout with Northwood and Prescott. Will there be somewhere in the future a similar review with Willamette vs Northwood?
I have builded a basic powerpoint , excel , word pc with Pentium 4 641 (3.2ghz) 775 socket with HT , 2gb ddr2 ram and a radeon 2600xt 256mb card. I am impressed how well it handles basic tasks and web browing , even using windows 7 for operating system it runs stable. Recently i updated the sata hdd to a 120gb ssd,now its even faster , ofcourse the cpu bottlenecks the videocard and the ssd,but its stil useable in 2019.
Any experience with the 848P chipset? I have a brand new ECS 848P-A mobo. One of the lesser boards in terms of performance (which is why I never used it when I acquired it back in the day) but I figure this might be a good application for it. It's a beautiful purple board that would look nice in a modern case.
gigabyte 8i865GME here with celeron D 3.3ghz and 512mb ram. probably the absolute highest clock speeds win98 would ever see lol what a pain getting all the drivers in order though, up until a random event recently, i couldnt seem to get the sata (running in ide mode) to have transfer speeds higher than 5.5MB/sec. now it pulls at least 111MB/s with ssd. for graphics im running a Quadro fx3000 to use nGlide 3dfx emulation and WOW its good for that. for sound im running a SB live ct4830 (pain to find drivers for too) but i havent tried dos games with it yet.
I once had a dual P3-board with over 20 dead capacitors. It didn't post and, beside of fans, did nothing. After replacing the board works fine. And for around 10 bucks with 2 fast P3S and 512meg of ram was a great deal. When many capacitors are dead, the board maybe won't post, but will work fine after replacing. In your case, only around 50% are dead, so yeah, it will do something anyway.
my problem with pentium 4 is that I can't find a motherboard with any isa slots. dos games sound like nails on a chalkboard when not using a proper isa sound card.
Yes that is true. What about Adlib sound? A cheap C-Media card will do that and should work on a Pentium 4. Socket 754 and 939 with VIA chipset are great options for DOS compatible PCI sound cards.
I had an Pentium 4 2.6 GHz (northwood) with just a cheap cooler for years, never had any trouble regarding heat. Singlecore Northwoods aren't bad, even the later HT modells can be cooled easily. Only the prescott modells produce way to much heat for the performance. I still have a P4 board with CPU somewhere lying around.
Damn, I bought a P4 2.4b new back in the day. I overclocked it to 3.65ghz on it's stock cooler. In benchmarks it outperformed the HT capable P4 3.2 Prescott (years later) and ran cooler too. Makes me feel so old haha.
i'm more of a p3 guy, but you should check out the mobile p4s with speedsteps, not sure how they work but they might be interesting. i think only some motherboards support them, my 845gv detects my 2.4g mobile as a 1.6 and i cant change it, kinda weird. plus, it's cool as hell. i never thought i would see a fanless p4 in my entire life lol
Can you check out dgVoodoo 2? its a dx11 wrapper for older api's that lets you play old games on newer operating systems. I used it to get railroad tycoon 3 (which you should add to your test suite) working in windows 10. its great and it would be a fun video for it to compared to actual retro hardware with retro games.
Phil, for a Soyo SY-5EHM Super Socket 7 board, why would an ATX PSU have issues with the floppy controller? Before my AT supertower had its power supply go out, the PSU in it gave me working floppy drives.
Should test some Athlon Thunderbirds, XPs and 64s. I really think the Athlon64 Socket 939 Platform is one of the best for retro gaming as the chips are based off common ones of the era as opposed to a brand new design like the P4, you have easy compatibility for PCI Express, PCI and AGP ports (meaning you could theoretically have any GPU swapped in as you need/want it among other things) and SATA. Personally I think they make a lot more sense than a P4, they did back in the day after all...And the P4s power consumption here would clearly be the more modern, more efficient PSU which could also run an A64 system. (Would be very interesting to compare to old school reviews to see how much difference the PSU alone can make with a few years difference)
Oh, sorry. I've seen those videos. I meant in a big comparison of CPUs or something, kinda like get a reference score across a whole variety of benchmarks for each major CPU arch at common speeds and the like in a single video so the information is centralised. Should have explained myself better.
Yea that's likely not going to happen as the work involved is too much. I rather do more specific and narrow comparisons. But after a while a broader picture should emerge anyway.
With DOS stuff, this is doable, as benchmarking is a breeze. But Windows 98? Just the Windows re-installations, even with images, it takes much, much longer.
Heh, my first PC was way slower than these: A single Slot1 500MHZ P3. Unfortunately I don't remember much else, than a DVD drive, SB Live and a Soltek Mobo. I... think it was a VIA chipset. 17" AOC monitor. 4.1 Cambridge Soundworks (I still have this set!). Rock solid pc! I thought about rebuilding it, or some other SLOT1.
Phil your 3d2k1 bench has issues. 9000+ for the P3 it is OK, P4s are much faster than 7k, you must redone this for sure. P4 1.6 should be around the P3 1.4...basically the P3 1.4 is around 1.7(especially with 865 and dual channel maybe the 1.6 could match it) as i have said in your previous video for Tualatin. In all great video.
While I agree that his P4s should be doing better in 3D2k1, I'll point out that the Tualatin is surprisingly competitive. My PIII-S at 1575 scores 13,600 with a 6800GT, which is pretty much a tie with the 2.4A (400FSB, i845E, same GPU).
13600 with P3 seems a lot to me but then again...i have not checked in detail such setup..to my mind it is an abomination. Best card for P3 is ti4600..stll bottlenecked but about 2-3 k better than Geforce 3
It's definitely a faster than usual P3 build. Not only is the processor overclocked, but it's based on one of the rare DDR s370 boards. PIII-S with a 150MHz FSB and 2GB of CL2 DDR memory just screams.
I assume you have one of the SIS chipsets. What nvidia drivers do you use and what windows? Extra bandwidth of DDR memory really does not count so much for P3...and for the shake of this, in Hwbot.org (check if you don't know)..best score with 1.6ghz is 13000 with better video card (3850 agp)..sorry friend but the maths do not work for you..
Pentium 4 is a rather strange animal with rather erratic performance. Many times it just works fine, then you suddenly run into something that's way too slow and nothing can explain it. I, for example, succeeded to write a 256-byte intro that runs at 5 fps/GHz on P6 CPUs (up to Nehalem's generations), 20 fps/GHz on K7-K12 ones... and 1 fps/GHz on P4s. And I don't really know why. But at least I have a theory that it has to do something with trace cache. It gets P4-slow on Sandy Bridge and later P6 clade CPUs, after all. And it's still fast on an AMD Trinity A4, even though I expected otherwise. It's a really extreme example but it does exist. Other downside of a usual P4 retro build is the lack of ISA slots. If you're aiming for a Windows machine it's not a big deal, though. For DOS it's possible to get P4 boards with fully functional ISA, like my Soyo SY-P4I845PEISA. It's a twisted thing to have, it's pretty good for high resolution DOS gaming though fastvid is a bit quirky with these late boards and video cards. But Blood runs fully playable on it with a 3.06/533 Northwood and a vanilla Asus Riva 128, in 1600x1200. In this game it can beat an Abit KT7A+Palomino XP combo. (And of course a 3.06GHz Northwood wipes up the floor with a 1.4-1.7GHz Palomino in more modern - Windows - games.)
I'd be interested in seeing how a 3GHz Northwood P4 on S478 with DDR1 compares to a Prescott P4 on LGA775 with DDR1 Vs. DDR2 to a Cedar Mill P4, maybe with a Pentium D in the mix for comparing HT'd P4's to native dual-core P4's under the same workloads
We will for sure check this out at some point. This time period is super interesting, but I haven't found a good format or approach yet as there are just so many systems and chipsets.
I'm working on a Pentium III system right now (a 1Ghz) with my next retro system being a Core2Duo running Windows XP. I explicitly did not get a Pentium IV system. Here's why: - the Pentium IV didn't do so well compared to the Pentium III (this was the era where AMD was dominant) so you won't find as many good motherboards second hand let alone one with ISA slots, AGP and Intel chipset ... . There's a ton of Dell stuff that is pretty useless but otherwise ... . - the Pentium IV ran very hot and was notorious for loud & annoying coolers. - the Pentium III could actually be overclocked easily because it didn't get as hot - you could easily OC it 50% & higher and it would remain stable! - USB isn't an issue when it comes to Windows 98 and a Pentium III. You can get a USB 2.0 hub that pops into a PCI slot and is instantly recognised by Windows 98. I can read & write at 20MB a sec which is plenty! - a Pentium III is just more period correct to me since the Pentium IV appeared at the start of Windows XP and lasted all through its life until the Core2Duo appeared for Windows Vista. So if you consider a Pentium III is more quiet, easier to OC, easier to find quality mobos with ISA slots, period correct, ... that leaves the Pentium 4 with being cheaper as a CPU ... if you can find a motherboard ... and potentially slightly faster. But then the question is: why do you build a high end Windows 98 PC? To get more FPS? Sure, but most games that would need it, also run fine in Windows XP so just build a Core2Duo system then! A Pentium III system would be a good match for pretty much all Windows 98 games pre-Windows XP and then, just get a Core2Duo system for post-Windows XP games!
I was trying to find a laptop that runs windows 2000 but also has the capacity to play most games of the time (most powerful game would be Civilization 4). Was there such a laptop and what kind of things should I be looking for?
Hi, if you are in Australia, Ebay and Gumtree has over 20 pages of computers under $100 Most of the desktops between 40-100 are core 2 duo, i usually flick through the photos until i see something in beige or with a floppy, If it is a HP / Dell / Lenovo i get the model number and google. Most of those big 3 are fine, except most are either SFF or have unique power supplies. Searching for the world ISA and sot by big dollars first may help, the word Pentium appears to often to be used as a search but you do see Pentium 4 in tiles or details I picked up a IBM P4 2.6 for $25 with fresh XP install Just after Xmas, it runs on IDE for hard drive, but has sata as well, unfortunately it is all PCI slots and WinXP , but the good parts is the machine has 1 x pci ,but it has a riser board with x3 slots horizontal and can take full height card. Being XP , it has just cmd command prompt only for dos emulation dos games work ok ,but if they need sound they run slow as the sound drivers are not supported in dos legacy , any sound coming through is via windows in the background and very choppy, eg Doom 1 or Doom2 feels like it runs at 1 frame per second
Very interesting Video, I have a Pentium 4 Retro system that I use , Motherboard is Acer OEM board VERY similar to ECS L4S5M V 5.0 this accepts 400 & 533 fsb Pentium 4 CPUs, I run a 3.06 ghz 533 fsb and has the Distinct advantage of having a UNIVERSAL AGP slot (VERY IMPORTANT) , most P4 boards had switched over to AGP 4x standard by now and this means ALL 3.3V AGP cards , including Vodoo 5 5500 etc CANNOT be used in them , I use this motherboard because I can plug in ANY AGP card , even really old ones and dont need several systems to benchmark a group of AGP cards, If only the board had an ISA slot, it would be perfect for retro gaming !
Yes, bang on , Phil Sis 645DX (?) have a few intel 865 boards as well but seem to use the SiS one because I have alot of older AGP x1 x2 cards (bit more of a variety for me) . Maybe of interest and relevant to this video , I was on Ebay USA looking for stuff for a P3 build and Tualatin stuff, pretty thin on the ground and $$$, noticed a listing for Tualatin cpus both P3 and celeron that had been Modded to work in some older non Tualatin motherboards , thought could be a good way of upgrading to a tualatin without having to buy a new expensive tualatin supporting motherboard, do a search for Intel Tualatin Pentium-IIIs 1.4GHz(512K) include On-chip Socket Adapter!!!, never knew this was possible!. I try to think of some suggestions for you for videos , only to find out you have already done a video on it!, maybe some review of oddball stuff like Matrox M3D(kyro)? , I picked up 2 x S3 Chrome S20 pcie cards a while ago, Dx9, XP cards , never heard of them , and did a dual card setup called multichrome, kinda like a Xfire or SLI setup but no bridge etc, played Farcry ok on lower resolutions, beautiful clear display from them , miss S3 stuff
Nick, the thing is that most of the stuff that I don't have, is now super rare and expensive. So there is not much I can do, and I always have a budget angle as well. It's just that people think I'm rich, but all I do is buy things when nobody is interested, so now I'm reaping the rewards :D The stuff I'm buying now is all "this isn't retro!" stuff, but in 10 years time it will become interesting.
Hello Phil, I do understand where you are coming from , looking at prices of voodoo cards , top of the line 6800 7800 cards for win98se etc is insane what stuff goes for, I used to spend $$$ on new stuff but in the last few years have got into retro stuff , I get as much enjoyment out of it and there is more variety in graphics cards/sound cards of yesteryear than nowadays (only nvidia and AMD) . probably , like you, I just cant justify spending more than$AU 10-20 for a graphics card for a retro system, unless its something really unique or I really want it. I really liked the series you did where you asked viewers to vote on components for a build, maybe something like that based on hardware around about a certain year or maybe do 2 builds , using hardware you already have , 1 AMD and the other Intel of a certain period, sure to get opinions flying around!
Hello Phil, I do understand where you are coming from , looking at prices of voodoo cards , top of the line 6800 7800 cards for win98se etc is insane what stuff goes for, I used to spend $$$ on new stuff but in the last few years have got into retro stuff , I get as much enjoyment out of it and there is more variety in graphics cards/sound cards of yesteryear than nowadays (only nvidia and AMD) . probably , like you, I just cant justify spending more than$AU 10-20 for a graphics card for a retro system, unless its something really unique or I really want it. I really liked the series you did where you asked viewers to vote on components for a build, maybe something like that based on hardware around about a certain year or maybe do 2 builds , using hardware you already have , 1 AMD and the other Intel of a certain period, sure to get opinions flying around!
I have a Pentium 4 motherboard left over from an upgrade and I thought that maybe the old Pentium 4 motherboard could be used for a retro Windows 98 gaming PC build but finding chipset drivers was a nightmare and after weeks of trying to hunt down drivers I was unable to get anywhere with it, no audio and the video was the ugly 16 bit color although the USB worked... I'm currently looking for a suitable Pentium III system... I also won a box of old AGP video cards on ebay, I did test them on the P4 running win98 but as usual I ran into the issue of not being able to find driver's for any of them. With a Pentium III I'm more likely to get things to work natively under Windows 98SE
The problem I see with this video is the graphics card. If you're looking to build a retro gaming pc on a budget, I think top of line cards from a generation (such as the FX 5950) aren't going to be considered. While I know you were trying to show the raw power of each, I think you should pair it with a cheaper card (such as a GeForce 6200, Radeon X300, etc) and see how it performs there.
The video card was for the benchmarking as we are comparing CPUs, I'm sure I mentioned this. There are build videos on my channel if that's what you are interested in.
Thanks for the Video Phil I like the Pentium 4, The Pentium 3 Motherboards cost too much right now. the only problem i have is some of the newer Pentium 4 CPU`s have Hyper-Threading and Windows 98 does not have support. have you had any issues with this or do you just use the older P4`s that don`t have it?
You can lose as much as half the performance of the CPU with HT enabled on Windows 98 if you can't turn it off. Not being able to disable HT is pretty rare in practice though, I only ever came across a handful of machines that couldn't turn HT off, mostly relegated to OEM machines.
I have an 845 chipset dell OptiPlex 520 with a Pentium 4 at 3.4 ghz, and an ATI 9200, how well would this work for any 98 game with everything maxed out?
Would windows 98 be fully happy with that top end Pentium 4? As in stable, since I didn't see you mention the 3.4ghz model, I was just wondering. Also which 9000 series ati do you recommend? And would there be a way to have 98 see my integrated soundcard? I don't think I have more then one pci slot in that tower, its been awhile since I seen it due to injuries I'm not able to work on it atm.
See if you can find 98 drivers for that machine, being a DELL, should be easy to find out. A PCI sound card would make life easier. With the graphics card, the higher end AGP cards unfortunately can be a bit expensive. For ATI a Radeon 9500 or 9600 would be a lot faster. With Nviida you have more options, something from the GeForce 3, 4 or FX range works well. Best to do further research, there is a ton out there, what you want, but the 9200 is a good start, see how it goes. And you can downgrade the CPU to something with 2.4 or 2.6 GHz.
They are very similar, the Intel chipset and its stability and compatibility are one reason. So you get SATA ports that work with modern gear, especially VIA chipsets struggle with this. But the Athlon has cooler running CPUs and you can play around with the multiplier.
Great video as always, I'm getting ready to build my own P4 Win98 retro machine, have all the parts already and it cost me 7€ total. P4 2.8 Ghz Northwood, MSI 875p chipset board, 2 x 512 MB DDR 400, GeForce 4 Ti 4200 and a SB Audigy (might get A3d/SB Live if it doesn't work). When you were talking about it still being too fast even with caches disabled - wouldn't underclocking the RAM help a bit? With caches off the CPU needs to fetch everything from system memory all the time, so it should be impacted by it's speed more than normal. Or am I missing something?
I've read that the Core series were a revised Pentium 3 architecture after they canned the shitty P4 netburst architecture. I wonder how the first Conroe CPUs would compare to these CPUs you looked at?
The Pentium M came before the Core series. Have a look at the performance for a Pentium M in a desktop board vs. a Pentium 4. Search for a review of the Asus CT-479 adapter. ;)
Yes, if I remember correctly, the Pentium M was based on the PIII Tualatin, and it later evolved into the Core-CPUs. There were desktop boards (and adapters) available for the Pentium M. A 2,13 GHz M was usually faster than the 3.4GHz Prescott "Extreme Edition".
Phil - If you're able to get your hands on one, there are also Pentium M "on desktop" setups too : www.anandtech.com/show/1610 (and OC results: www.anandtech.com/show/1610/18 )
I heard of them, they are very premium and really not something I could use for more than just one video or so. So yea, likely not going to happen unless I find one super cheap.
Not mine - but here's a new socket 479 board: www.ebay.com/itm/Axiomtek-SBC86807-V2-0-Intel-Socket-479-Dual-LAN-Mini-ITX-Embedded-Motherboard-/182280770175 "make an offer" and processors (P-M 770) are as cheap as $4 shipped. Just add a DIMM. I believe all P-Ms are single channel. You should put a paypal link on your page ..
Hey Phil, do you know what Pentium IIIs are compatible with the SE440BX-2? I've been using a Pentium II 300 for a while in my Win98 computer and have been considering upgrading to a P3 for later games, but I don't know which ones are surefire compatible - I hear some of the later 1ghz CPUs are incompatible. What's the fastest I can get while still assuring that I won't have to worry about compatibility?
In theory all the chips with 100 FSB. But many good 440BX boards can be run at 133 FSB, which would enable even the 1 GHz Coppermine to run on them. People mod them to run Tualatins on them. at 133 FSB the 440BX is still faster than i815, but the later can reack 150 FSB easily.
I think the 100FSB models should be enough for me - I'm not trying to run anything super crazy on it, and if I want amazing performance I'll use my XP Celeron laptop for that. I just want a nice performance boost for some late 90s games like Battlezone and Heavy Gear
What can you say of a socket 754 amd64 for windows 98? Asus board with driver disk, but i had some blue screen crashing issues after installing drivers. Is it generally a no go in your opinion or just windows 98 acting up as always? Ended up with Me instead, but theres some dos compatability issue I've heard?
In what resolution have you tested the 3dMark2000? I reach 12200 points (default benchmark settings of 1024x768x16) with a 1575Mhz Tualatin, best memory timings, and Ti 4600 (Detonator 44.03 and 98 SE with SP 2.1e). For evidence, I will make a video in the near future. :)
I am sure that you will have much better resolute on Win NT platforms then on Win 9x Back in a day I and a friend of mine tested Serious Sam 1 on Pentium 3 500MHz Slot 128mb RAM and 32MB Geforce 3 TItanium ( I do not remember well the model) And with Windows XP the game was perfect smooth on very high graphics, but on Windows 95 the resolute where not so well.
I have a 775 Pentium D motherboard from Asus that has Windows 98 drivers ;) I may install it today.. what turn me off though is i only have 2GB sticks of DDR2 and W98 is not friendly with that
PhilsComputerLab well, I would have to check in some of the boards, but I remember having that option in the bios, some real cheap ones like Pc Chips and the like
Hello i have a question, for the hardware and driver knowledgeable, i got Win 95 up and running on a Pentium 4 "Asrock K7VT 4Apro motherborad", but i do not seem to find USB driver for the VIA chipset on it, maybe there is none and i should install Win 98SE?
At 8:58, Phil mentions the utility he usually uses to slow down the PC, but I can't quite make out what he says. Can someone please link/point me to it?
Thank you! I'm trying to get Scorched Planet (DOS) to run, but lowering it to the lowest multi (2,5 x 66 MHz) is too fast. On the other hand, disabling the caches makes it way too slow. Regardless of which option I choose in Throttle, it seems to have the same effect as disabling the caches. So I'll try SetMul.
Please, could I get a suggestion? I've got an Athlon 64 rig, and I'd like to install Windows 98 on it. But the installation gets stuck at "Windows searching installed hardware" after copying the install files. I've got a Radeon X700SE graphics and overall a 2005 setup. Should I seek a P4 PC instead? :
PhilsComputerLab Thank you for response, Phill! Yup, it is. Even dual PCIe! More specifially under the hood: AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 1 GB of DDR memory, Mobo being ASUS A8N-SLI Premium (Socket 939) (with AC97 sound chip), GPU being PCIe 256MB ATI Radeon x700 Series, and a 74GB WD branded SATA hard drive. And an ASUS CD burner. Anticlimactic for a Windows 98 installation, I fear.
Ah yes, so I can see why this could cause issues. Firstly reduce the RAM, out of the box there is a 512MB limit. And PCIe, I've never tried 98 on one, all my systems are AGP. But try the RAM first!
PhilsComputerLab All right, sire! Thank you for help, I'll let you know whether the PCI-E card will work on Windows 98 - if removing a stick does the trick first, comrade! Thank you for your dedidative and enlightening videos, Phill.
I guess that the Pentium III-S oc'ed to 1.6 GHz would get performance between the P4 2.0A and the P4 2.4B, right? I mean in the games where the P3-S is basically the same as the 1.6a
Pretty much. On average, my PIII-S @ 1575 benchmarks almost exactly like a P4 2.4A (that's the 400FSB version) on an i845E motherboard. That's with a 6800GT in both machines.
I costs nothing for some new good capacitors when you comparing it to the cost of killing a piece of hardware. It only takes about 30 minutes to do and what you get is a PC which will be rock solid for years
The attraction of the Pentium III is that the boards usually come with soundcard friendly ISA slots (esp. if its a 440BX board) and usually work in DOS with PCI cards. The downside of Pentium 4 era hardware is that it usually has problems with caps and runs much hotter.
I was just about to throw away my PIII and P4 machines both sitting in a basement for approx 10+ years. But thanks to you Phil. Your videos inspired me to take care of them and PIII 1Ghz is already running based on VIA chipset MB with FC-PGA socket, with a great SB LIVE! 5.1, with 3DLabs Oxygene VX1 workstation graphics and 10GB oldschool Qunatum HDD. Everything works liek it was yesterday... damn that's nostalgic ;)
A Dell Dimension 4550 is what I use for my Win98 setup. With a 2.8GHz P4 and Radeon 9600XT, it's plenty fast for just about anything you can throw at it.
For me I use a Compaq Evo D510.
Cool, I used to have a Dell Dimension 4550, as well. My father used to work as a custodian, so they were getting rid of some Dell machines. My father salvaged a Dell Dimension 4550, and I used to do all sorts of modifications to it. I even installed Windows 98, in the system. I also bought different Geforce cards, for the system. The video card I used for the system, was a Geforce4 Ti 4600. It was a really good video card, and I would get around 11,000 3DMark scores, with both 3DMark 2000 and 2001 SE. Forgot to mention that the system had a 2 GHz CPU. Last year, I had to throw the system away because the capacitors capsized on the motherboard. I salvaged some good parts, from the system, before I threw it away. I plan on buying another Dell DImension 4550 from Ebay, one of these days. I would like to this time, slap in an Aureal Vortex 2 sound card (for A3D and classic SB Pro emulation) and a Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS sound card, as well as reinstall the Geforce4 Ti 4600 inside the PC.
I love your Channel the down side is I now regret getting rid of my Compaq PC rocking a celeron 1300 Tualatin core, I still have alot of my retro gear I refuse to Recycle mostly cause like your channel I LOVE tinkering hehe :D keep up the great work :D
I did something similar, mainly just with parts I had lying around. P4 3.2 GHz, GeForce 6800 Ultra, and an Audigy 2 ZS. Now my setup has no DOS sound support, but I’m building a different machine for that. For Win98 gaming I’m happy with it.
The advantage of using SiS chipsets on the Socket 478 platform is that some boards have universal AGP slots, which allows you to run something like a Voodoo5.
One other nice thing is that you actually can have sound effects working under DOS with a Yamaha YMF7x4 PCI without any TSR. (At least if your southbridge is a 962 or older.)
That's the same reason for me. A must have for V5 win98 SE period.
I just bought soltek 478 socket with via chipset and universal agp (2x-4x), finally my 3dfx 3000 meet his new old friend
Hi Phil,
Thanks for sharing all your expertise on retro pc computers, you have been a huge influence on me getting back into retro!
Great video! Look at that yucky P4 IPC. xD
And even when the P4 wins, I'm just way too much of a Pentium iii fanboy to care! And if I wanted newer, I'd definitely go with an Athlon, not the P4.
I found a Compaq Evo N600c at a thrift for around $5 US. It was designed for Win2k/NT but there were drivers for Win98. Because of your videos that's the route I picked. It's got a Tualitin based P III-M @1200 MHz and a RADEONX600 with a absurd (for the time) 1400x1050 resolution and is shaping up to be a nice Win98/DOS gaming system.
Nice! I always knew that a mobile Tualatin existed, but just never met anyone that had such a system! The X600 sounds quite modern though!
X600 is what both Windows and CPU-Z ID the card as but it appears to be a ATI Mobility Radeon w 16 MB DDR SDRAM. I had trouble finding Windows 98 drivers that would even work but wrong ID aside, 3D acceleration seems to work fine.The sound card is even a SB compatible so I've got sound effects and music for DOS titles like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D
Very nice.
These videos are so valuable, and help so much in making the right decisions in my building/modification. Thanks, Phil!!!
I prefer the pentium III 1400. I have one and its super fast. Its more rewarding for me having a TOP Pentium III area machine than having a cheap pentium IV. It feels more correct for me, especially considering Windows 9x. For me, pentium IV is for Windows XP only. Pentium III is for Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP.
AGree on that. Like to have atleast somewhat period correct hardware.
A fast P3 for 98 SE, a Pen4 around 2.4-3.2 GHz for the high-end singlecore range. Or an Athlon with a similar rating. Then a Fast Core 2 for the late XP era.
yeah... but are too strange and expensive Tualatin motherboards, i have 2 pc for retro gaming, a pentium 3 800mhz for windows 98 and msdos, and a pentium 4 3.4 ghz for 32 bit xp games
@@HappyBeezerStudios for the late xp i dont have problem, a mother pc can run it very well
It is impressive how close the 1.4p3s can come to some P4 builds. At least on a P4 running the 845 chipset.
What motherboard you got? I have an ASUS TUV4x (on of the best in 2000) and 1ghz Pentium 3 Coppermine. Any chance you know anyone on ebay selling a 1.4 Pentium 3 ?
Thank you for putting the power Draw figures for the Pentium 4. The Power Draw is for some reason a thing that is of Major concern for me. Other than the heat and Power usage and Capacitor reliability, I think Pentium 4's make Great Budget windows 98 Machines. Even The Socket 478 Celerons are Pretty good For Older games. even though i'm more for authentic hardware like Slot 1 and Socket 7, I can't deny how Easy Pentium 4's are to retro fit for Windows 98 Games. As long as you keep them cool and use decent cooling solutions you should Be fine. Another thing to mention is that i think Pentium 4's Aren't Suited As well for Windows XP gaming as they are For 98 Games
That Tualatin really held its own in these tests! I own a dual 1.4 ghz S-Tualatin server. It was a real beast in its day. I have built a few of these P4 win 98 game rigs and they work very well. Cheap and reliable. You should really make a video about the Pentium pro if you havent already
I would set up whatever can use most modern parts, while cheap and available and at the same time let me enjoy the most quantity of games with great stability! A P4 seems like a great choice!
The only way I would set up a fast P3 is if already have all the parts.
Nice work as always!
nice video phil :)
AOpen MX46-533V + Pentium IV 3.06Ghz (533FSB) + Voodoo 5 5500 AGP =
I remember playing Delta Force Land Warrior on the go with my Pentium M laptop, then coming home and playing it on my Pentium 4 machine. It's such a great game. There are even some multiplayer servers still online
A very interesting comparisson would be a Tualatin 1.4 GHz Pentium 3 vs a Willamette 1.4 GHz Pentium 4
P3 would win by far lol
Stick a 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird in there, should make things even more interesting!
The PIII 1.4 would demolish the P4.
Intel had shifted strategy with Netburst and released a weaker architecture because they thought they could make up for it with raw clock speeds. We all see how that turned out.
1.4 Athlon would win.
Probably the reason why the P4 is even worse than Bulldozer.
As usual, excellent video. I've actually been using some kind of industrial P4 board with ISA. Sound cards work great in it for the most part: SBPro2 was not compatible, YMF719 DMA was weird so sound effects didn't always play correctly, but my Sound Blaster 16 and 32 cards all worked great in it. Unfortunately, I have to keep it in 400mhz FSB mode or the board simply will not boot, but I have achieved 2.6ghz in this thing. Way overkill for DOS, naturally :) But it was super cheap to build! RAM, CPU, all easy to find.
saxxonpike Thanks for the info about these newer MB with ISA slots. Very useful!!!
There are some nice option for ms dos sound - yamaha ymf724-based soud card. It has SB-Link (aka PC-PCI) port, which is actually GPIO port. I've seen some modern industrial mobos based on skylake/kaby lake with PCI slot and 8-bit GPIO port. I believe that it is possibile to use that port to transfer some useful data (irq, dma). But need some programming
i see Delta Force, instant like
I remember buying this game, it even bundled with a MP5 BB gun.
Beautiful Voxels.
Intel Chipset 865. I went back to be sure and it's a good thing I did, because I thought you said 855. Ok, thank you very much for the knowledge. 👍
Still rocking my Intel 845 (DFI NB32-SC) from way back in 2001.
Nice video about the Pentium III and IV comparisons. I am planning on making my own retro gaming computer one day (I used to have two old computers, one with Pentium III and one with Pentium 4 HT which both gone now) and after watching this video I am going to find old retro PC parts.
I’m a big fan of these myself, my favorite part is the chipset. Everyone hates it so much that great stable motherboards can be had for pretty much nothing.
Some may have already mentioned this in the comments but just in case...
For your SoundBlaster sound, have a look on both your motherboard and sound card for a pin header labelled 'SB_LNK' or similar. The address ranges that PCI devices use doesn't work too well when mapping to the I/O addresses that ISA used, so PCI sound cards had issues mapping to 220h in a real mode environment. If both your sound card and motherboard have those connectors, connect them up, that will sort out the I/O problem.
Many motherboards/sound cards of that era had the connector as it was a 'thing' at the time, many people wouldn't to a PCI sound card for that reason. It might be something that they found a work around for with some boards, I can remember having loads of systems that didn't need an SB link cable and their audio worked fine.
my first P4 was a 2.6Ghz TH 800mhz FSB chip. it was FAST for its day! i even started playing World of Warcraft on that with a 6600GT i got lucky and scored 3GB of ram for it a guy i know that worked in IT gave them to me in 2003 that was like winning the lottery...
had to get a E8400 with a 8800GTS to play wow as some point..
When I remember my 2.66 GHz P4 nothing good comes out of it. Well it was faster than what I had before, but nowadays I'd rather take a Celeron 420 insteadl.
I have to say, you are one of the few people I have seen that has had little to no issues with Jetway motherboards. My roommate used to own a computer store, and he would sell computers built with Jetway boards, but we had issues with more of them than we did with most other motherboards we sold. That said, before he moved on from his computer shop, the most stable boards we sold were MSI boards, but for some reason, one particular run of AMD motherboards with Nvidia chipsets, we had more issues with those, and it was a motherboard that, up to that point, we had never had any issues with. We had several warranty claims, he even replaced boards on the affected computers a few times with the same board, only to have the computer come back yet again. In the end, what it turned out to be was not a problem with the boards, but with the new revision of the bios, which had a setting that, by default, made the boards act stupid. Once he found this issue, he went through every computer he had built with those, and changed the bios setting that was causing the issues, and we stopped having those issues.
I had build my retroPC with P4 2GHz (easy to find today) and it works very well with Windows 98 and DOS in all retro games. For DOS sound i bought Creative SB Live! 5.1 for 8$ which have DOS driver and it works well. Built-In AC97 sound don't have native SB support and its easier to buy SB card instead of try to configure AC97. And i tryed GeForce 6600 and GeForce Ti4200 and last has better compatibility for old games. This video was interesting for me for comparing my build with your results.
Specs i'm using is:
MB: Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G on i865PE
CPU: P4 Northwood 2GHz
RAM: 2 x 256MB DDR @266MHz DualChannel
Video: ASUS GeForce Ti4200 AGP8X 128MB
3D Accelerator: 2 x 3DFx Voodoo 2 12MB @ SLI
Sound: Creative Live! 5.1
HDD: IDE Seagate Barracuda 40GB + IDE Seagate Barracuda 80GB
PSU: Thermaltake TR2 600W
How about using Pentium M 1.7GHz socket 478 CPUs on a Pentium 4 Socket 478 motherboard?
I've got a couple of old Dell P4 machines here. Should probably get around to mucking around with repairing them and installing windows 98 SE on them.
Pretty sure most of them just need new hard drives and a sound card. Might have 1 or 2 that needs a motherboard recap, but I run an electronics repair shop, so that's not exactly difficult.
IMO the best pentium 4, socket 478 is (2.8ghz 800mhz FSB 512), as the
TDP is 69.7 compaired to 87-103 for the 3.0/3.2/3.4. it is fast enough
for any windows 98/dos game Unreal 2004, Tribes vengeance etc, lower
heat so less fans needed and still can support Dos Via ICH5 also just
about removes then need for a xp retro system.
lmao I wish this came out yesterday. I just bought a Pentium III yesterday.
LOL Was it something high end and expensive?
Disobeyedtoast At least it won't burn your house down
no, luckily 800Mhz Coppermine.
Don't worry, you made the right choice. :D
Hell I bought a Tualatin 1.4 with a FCPGA adapter after watching this!! :D and now I have 3 coppermins and a tualatin! (only 1 P4)
AMD K7 3000+ forever!
Fanboyism aside, i haven't checked prices yet what can be gotten cheaper, but back then AMD beat the crap out of the P4s with its K7 XP CPUs. A 2000+ had around 10% more power at 1/3 the price when compared to a P4-2000 back then.
Bastet Furry Well I'm having a hard time finding older Socket A boards. Got KT266, but missing an early KT133 with SDRAM.
Hmm, one i found on ebay.de, if you don't mind the horrendous shipping costs that is: 372219591146
Bastet Furry Yea way too expensive.
Nah XP-M 2500+ @ 2.4 GHz will be way faster. Even leaving the XP 3200+ behind.
I hlave Like 5 old kt133 boards with sdram and I can not get rid of it.nobody wants the..
I conquer with using the 865 chipset. It works great for windows 98. And if you get an Asus enthusiest board or similar brand, the performance can be varied somewhat to suet ones needs. It is really cheap to find a low end northwood or Willamette celeron, and swap it out with a Prescott should you want a wide performance range in one machine. Even using single channel 266 mhz ram to dual channel 400 makes the performance very a lot, especially when taking the celeron vs htp4 into account.
MoHAA ftw! Remember having an AMD thunderbird 1ghz, went to an p4 with an 9800.. finally getting 40-60fps on the map bridge on 1024 res! was epic experience!
I reacently (finnaly!) got my obscure dual socket Opteron workstation based retro gaming PC.
Specs are.
Dual AMD Opteron 250 CPUs (2.6Ghz) server version of the FX-55 but only cost $14 each :D
MB Fujitsu-Siemens D1692-Bxx (still supported on Fujitsu's site, bios, drivers, manual etc..)
16Gb of DDR400 ECC
Audigy 2 ZS
AGP 8x BFG branded nvidia 6800 Ultra
Integrated broadcom Gb ethernet
IDE DVD drive
IDE 500Gb Hitachi CinemaStar
New EVGA 430W semi modular PSU
I had all kinds of issues trying to get an OS to work on it. XP worked sort of except it was limted to 3ish GB of ram and I could not get the Audigy 2 ZS to work correctly regardless of driver, same issue with win2k 98SE and win 7 on another PC with this card. Had to use 3rd part drivers with reduced functionality.
In the end i got a copy of win 2k3 server standard x64 edition and my god is it a great OS, everything installed out of the box and even nvidia supported driver up to version 307.xx with AGP support and 64bit. Newest 32 bit on XP was 175 or there abouts, anything newer did not support AGP, let alone 64 bit.
Not only that, the standard XP drivers from creative for XP worked out of the box on 64 bit 2k3 server lol, and ever worked correctly for the first time. Go figure! creative don't even support this OS so got me beat how it ended up working better than the supported OSs
Result are epic! plays all my old 1999-2004 games and really high performance.
My next project with this system is to laser cut some custom brackets to adapt Noctua NH-9US coolers as they are meant for socket AM2 and newer but AM2 have 4 mounting holes where socket 940 has 2 holes slightly closer to the CPU. The stock server coolers are like jet engines.
Yeah 2k3 server is great, I like it as its much like my other fav being win2k and the fact everything works out of the box (hardware/driver wise) is nice.
I have a question actually. Is there a way to disable in 2k3 the reason prompt when shutting down? So that it is a bit more desktop friendly. It always asks what the reason for shutting down is which is kinda annoying. Also is there something that blocks the installation of 3rd part browsers? a policy maybe? as I can't get any of the popular browser installers to start. they just do nothing when doubled clicked or run as admin. I even tried old versions of FF, chrome and opera that state support for 2k3 64 and XP 64 but they also don't start.
Thanks heaps for that. I was aware of the windows component that needs to be removed to use IE, but I didn't think that would effect installing other browsers. I will try it out and see if it fixes it.
yeah win2k I was using up until 2006 or so. I gave XP heaps of goes but it was always causing me issues with stability over the few systems I had, so I always revered back to 2k. Then vista came out and I loved it. it ran great on my 4 core AMD with 2 way SLI 9800GTXs and 8Gb ram, that was in 2008. I ran vista ultimate X64 and I had 0 issues despite people saying it was bad. In fact I was able to play some games for the first time since win 98 as I could not get them to work on 2k or XP for years of trying but vista worked out of the box, go figure.
Disabling the shutdown event tracker worked nicely. Thanks for the tip.
However removing IE enhanced security component from windows didn't help, in either installing another browser or running the included IE6. In IE it now complains that the enhanced security is not installed and stops me from loading any sites. FF, chrome and Opera still fail to start the installer. Same split sec hourglass on the pointer and then nothing. Have no idea why?
Out of curiosity after i seen this video: Over 1,5 years ago you made a big shootout with Northwood and Prescott. Will there be somewhere in the future a similar review with Willamette vs Northwood?
Not sure, I still have 1 video unlisted from that series...
I was running a 2 GHz P4 up to about 6 years ago. I got tons of that old hardware still.
I have builded a basic powerpoint , excel , word pc with Pentium 4 641 (3.2ghz) 775 socket with HT , 2gb ddr2 ram and a radeon 2600xt 256mb card. I am impressed how well it handles basic tasks and web browing , even using windows 7 for operating system it runs stable. Recently i updated the sata hdd to a 120gb ssd,now its even faster , ofcourse the cpu bottlenecks the videocard and the ssd,but its stil useable in 2019.
Any experience with the 848P chipset? I have a brand new ECS 848P-A mobo. One of the lesser boards in terms of performance (which is why I never used it when I acquired it back in the day) but I figure this might be a good application for it. It's a beautiful purple board that would look nice in a modern case.
gigabyte 8i865GME here with celeron D 3.3ghz and 512mb ram. probably the absolute highest clock speeds win98 would ever see lol what a pain getting all the drivers in order though, up until a random event recently, i couldnt seem to get the sata (running in ide mode) to have transfer speeds higher than 5.5MB/sec. now it pulls at least 111MB/s with ssd. for graphics im running a Quadro fx3000 to use nGlide 3dfx emulation and WOW its good for that. for sound im running a SB live ct4830 (pain to find drivers for too) but i havent tried dos games with it yet.
EPIC PINBALL & Delta Force LW!!!
so many hours "wasted" on that games (DF1 was better IMO)....
fabulous video Phil!
I once had a dual P3-board with over 20 dead capacitors. It didn't post and, beside of fans, did nothing. After replacing the board works fine. And for around 10 bucks with 2 fast P3S and 512meg of ram was a great deal. When many capacitors are dead, the board maybe won't post, but will work fine after replacing. In your case, only around 50% are dead, so yeah, it will do something anyway.
my problem with pentium 4 is that I can't find a motherboard with any isa slots. dos games sound like nails on a chalkboard when not using a proper isa sound card.
Yes that is true. What about Adlib sound? A cheap C-Media card will do that and should work on a Pentium 4. Socket 754 and 939 with VIA chipset are great options for DOS compatible PCI sound cards.
I had an Pentium 4 2.6 GHz (northwood) with just a cheap cooler for years, never had any trouble regarding heat.
Singlecore Northwoods aren't bad, even the later HT modells can be cooled easily. Only the prescott modells produce way to much heat for the performance.
I still have a P4 board with CPU somewhere lying around.
Damn, I bought a P4 2.4b new back in the day. I overclocked it to 3.65ghz on it's stock cooler. In benchmarks it outperformed the HT capable P4 3.2 Prescott (years later) and ran cooler too. Makes me feel so old haha.
What kind of unlocked motherboard are you using to achieved 3.65 ghz? I'm looking to build a retro XP Gaming PC
i'm more of a p3 guy, but you should check out the mobile p4s with speedsteps, not sure how they work but they might be interesting. i think only some motherboards support them, my 845gv detects my 2.4g mobile as a 1.6 and i cant change it, kinda weird. plus, it's cool as hell. i never thought i would see a fanless p4 in my entire life lol
Can you check out dgVoodoo 2? its a dx11 wrapper for older api's that lets you play old games on newer operating systems. I used it to get railroad tycoon 3 (which you should add to your test suite) working in windows 10. its great and it would be a fun video for it to compared to actual retro hardware with retro games.
Phil, for a Soyo SY-5EHM Super Socket 7 board, why would an ATX PSU have issues with the floppy controller? Before my AT supertower had its power supply go out, the PSU in it gave me working floppy drives.
use ess-solo1 and you get soundblaster to work under dos.
use "cpucache on/off" to disable/enable the cpucache on the fly
Should test some Athlon Thunderbirds, XPs and 64s. I really think the Athlon64 Socket 939 Platform is one of the best for retro gaming as the chips are based off common ones of the era as opposed to a brand new design like the P4, you have easy compatibility for PCI Express, PCI and AGP ports (meaning you could theoretically have any GPU swapped in as you need/want it among other things) and SATA.
Personally I think they make a lot more sense than a P4, they did back in the day after all...And the P4s power consumption here would clearly be the more modern, more efficient PSU which could also run an A64 system. (Would be very interesting to compare to old school reviews to see how much difference the PSU alone can make with a few years difference)
The thing is, I do, and did. You really got to check out previous videos, or run a search or something :)
Oh, sorry. I've seen those videos. I meant in a big comparison of CPUs or something, kinda like get a reference score across a whole variety of benchmarks for each major CPU arch at common speeds and the like in a single video so the information is centralised. Should have explained myself better.
Yea that's likely not going to happen as the work involved is too much. I rather do more specific and narrow comparisons. But after a while a broader picture should emerge anyway.
With DOS stuff, this is doable, as benchmarking is a breeze. But Windows 98? Just the Windows re-installations, even with images, it takes much, much longer.
Heh, my first PC was way slower than these: A single Slot1 500MHZ P3. Unfortunately I don't remember much else, than a DVD drive, SB Live and a Soltek Mobo. I... think it was a VIA chipset. 17" AOC monitor.
4.1 Cambridge Soundworks (I still have this set!).
Rock solid pc!
I thought about rebuilding it, or some other SLOT1.
I'd love to see you check out the entire series of socket 423 Pentium 4's.
Netburst is just a space heater. It's hot enough here as it is
Hi Phil love the channel.. I have a 386 motherboard of ya interested
..also where did you get your test bench
Phil your 3d2k1 bench has issues. 9000+ for the P3 it is OK, P4s are much faster than 7k, you must redone this for sure. P4 1.6 should be around the P3 1.4...basically the P3 1.4 is around 1.7(especially with 865 and dual channel maybe the 1.6 could match it) as i have said in your previous video for Tualatin. In all great video.
While I agree that his P4s should be doing better in 3D2k1, I'll point out that the Tualatin is surprisingly competitive. My PIII-S at 1575 scores 13,600 with a 6800GT, which is pretty much a tie with the 2.4A (400FSB, i845E, same GPU).
Yea they seem a bit low, I even gave it dual channel config. Will check it out when I do another project with that chipset.
13600 with P3 seems a lot to me but then again...i have not checked in detail such setup..to my mind it is an abomination. Best card for P3 is ti4600..stll bottlenecked but about 2-3 k better than Geforce 3
It's definitely a faster than usual P3 build. Not only is the processor overclocked, but it's based on one of the rare DDR s370 boards. PIII-S with a 150MHz FSB and 2GB of CL2 DDR memory just screams.
I assume you have one of the SIS chipsets. What nvidia drivers do you use and what windows? Extra bandwidth of DDR memory really does not count so much for P3...and for the shake of this, in Hwbot.org (check if you don't know)..best score with 1.6ghz is 13000 with better video card (3850 agp)..sorry friend but the maths do not work for you..
Pentium 4 is a rather strange animal with rather erratic performance. Many times it just works fine, then you suddenly run into something that's way too slow and nothing can explain it. I, for example, succeeded to write a 256-byte intro that runs at 5 fps/GHz on P6 CPUs (up to Nehalem's generations), 20 fps/GHz on K7-K12 ones... and 1 fps/GHz on P4s. And I don't really know why. But at least I have a theory that it has to do something with trace cache. It gets P4-slow on Sandy Bridge and later P6 clade CPUs, after all. And it's still fast on an AMD Trinity A4, even though I expected otherwise. It's a really extreme example but it does exist.
Other downside of a usual P4 retro build is the lack of ISA slots. If you're aiming for a Windows machine it's not a big deal, though. For DOS it's possible to get P4 boards with fully functional ISA, like my Soyo SY-P4I845PEISA. It's a twisted thing to have, it's pretty good for high resolution DOS gaming though fastvid is a bit quirky with these late boards and video cards. But Blood runs fully playable on it with a 3.06/533 Northwood and a vanilla Asus Riva 128, in 1600x1200. In this game it can beat an Abit KT7A+Palomino XP combo. (And of course a 3.06GHz Northwood wipes up the floor with a 1.4-1.7GHz Palomino in more modern - Windows - games.)
Given the significant higher clockspeed of the P4 2.0Ghz I must say the P3 1.4Ghz is really strong!
Cheaper, easier to get and performs over 90% of performance. I'll go with the P4.
I'd be interested in seeing how a 3GHz Northwood P4 on S478 with DDR1 compares to a Prescott P4 on LGA775 with DDR1 Vs. DDR2 to a Cedar Mill P4, maybe with a Pentium D in the mix for comparing HT'd P4's to native dual-core P4's under the same workloads
We will for sure check this out at some point. This time period is super interesting, but I haven't found a good format or approach yet as there are just so many systems and chipsets.
Nice video I did grow up with a pentium d
I'm working on a Pentium III system right now (a 1Ghz) with my next retro system being a Core2Duo running Windows XP. I explicitly did not get a Pentium IV system. Here's why:
- the Pentium IV didn't do so well compared to the Pentium III (this was the era where AMD was dominant) so you won't find as many good motherboards second hand let alone one with ISA slots, AGP and Intel chipset ... . There's a ton of Dell stuff that is pretty useless but otherwise ... .
- the Pentium IV ran very hot and was notorious for loud & annoying coolers.
- the Pentium III could actually be overclocked easily because it didn't get as hot - you could easily OC it 50% & higher and it would remain stable!
- USB isn't an issue when it comes to Windows 98 and a Pentium III. You can get a USB 2.0 hub that pops into a PCI slot and is instantly recognised by Windows 98. I can read & write at 20MB a sec which is plenty!
- a Pentium III is just more period correct to me since the Pentium IV appeared at the start of Windows XP and lasted all through its life until the Core2Duo appeared for Windows Vista.
So if you consider a Pentium III is more quiet, easier to OC, easier to find quality mobos with ISA slots, period correct, ... that leaves the Pentium 4 with being cheaper as a CPU ... if you can find a motherboard ... and potentially slightly faster.
But then the question is: why do you build a high end Windows 98 PC? To get more FPS? Sure, but most games that would need it, also run fine in Windows XP so just build a Core2Duo system then! A Pentium III system would be a good match for pretty much all Windows 98 games pre-Windows XP and then, just get a Core2Duo system for post-Windows XP games!
I was trying to find a laptop that runs windows 2000 but also has the capacity to play most games of the time (most powerful game would be Civilization 4). Was there such a laptop and what kind of things should I be looking for?
I had duron 700 on socketA and then AthlonXP 2000+, they were epic processors
this is basically what I've been looking for but cannot find for a reasonable price and refuse to buy on ebay
Hi, if you are in Australia, Ebay and Gumtree has over 20 pages of computers under $100
Most of the desktops between 40-100 are core 2 duo, i usually flick through the photos until i see something in beige or with a floppy, If it is a HP / Dell / Lenovo i get the model number and google.
Most of those big 3 are fine, except most are either SFF or have unique power supplies.
Searching for the world ISA and sot by big dollars first may help, the word Pentium appears to often to be used as a search but you do see Pentium 4 in tiles or details
I picked up a IBM P4 2.6 for $25 with fresh XP install Just after Xmas, it runs on IDE for hard drive, but has sata as well, unfortunately it is all PCI slots and WinXP , but the good parts is the machine has 1 x pci ,but it has a riser board with x3 slots horizontal and can take full height card.
Being XP , it has just cmd command prompt only for dos emulation dos games work ok ,but if they need sound they run slow as the sound drivers are not supported in dos legacy , any sound coming through is via windows in the background and very choppy, eg Doom 1 or Doom2 feels like it runs at 1 frame per second
a DAA781 motherboard +A10-7800k and 256GB of DDR3 RAM no graphics card required as that and the sound card are integrated into the A10 -7800K
Very interesting Video, I have a Pentium 4 Retro system that I use , Motherboard is Acer OEM board VERY similar to ECS L4S5M V 5.0 this accepts 400 & 533 fsb Pentium 4 CPUs, I run a 3.06 ghz 533 fsb and has the Distinct advantage of having a UNIVERSAL AGP slot (VERY IMPORTANT) , most P4 boards had switched over to AGP 4x standard by now and this means ALL 3.3V AGP cards , including Vodoo 5 5500 etc CANNOT be used in them , I use this motherboard because I can plug in ANY AGP card , even really old ones and dont need several systems to benchmark a group of AGP cards, If only the board had an ISA slot, it would be perfect for retro gaming !
Let me guess, it has a SIS chipset? I have a few with SIS chipset and they are also universal AGP :)
Yes, bang on , Phil Sis 645DX (?) have a few intel 865 boards as well but seem to use the SiS one because I have alot of older AGP x1 x2 cards (bit more of a variety for me) . Maybe of interest and relevant to this video , I was on Ebay USA looking for stuff for a P3 build and Tualatin stuff, pretty thin on the ground and $$$, noticed a listing for Tualatin cpus both P3 and celeron that had been Modded to work in some older non Tualatin motherboards , thought could be a good way of upgrading to a tualatin without having to buy a new expensive tualatin supporting motherboard, do a search for Intel Tualatin Pentium-IIIs 1.4GHz(512K) include On-chip Socket Adapter!!!, never knew this was possible!. I try to think of some suggestions for you for videos , only to find out you have already done a video on it!, maybe some review of oddball stuff like Matrox M3D(kyro)? , I picked up 2 x S3 Chrome S20 pcie cards a while ago, Dx9, XP cards , never heard of them , and did a dual card setup called multichrome, kinda like a Xfire or SLI setup but no bridge etc, played Farcry ok on lower resolutions, beautiful clear display from them , miss S3 stuff
Nick, the thing is that most of the stuff that I don't have, is now super rare and expensive. So there is not much I can do, and I always have a budget angle as well. It's just that people think I'm rich, but all I do is buy things when nobody is interested, so now I'm reaping the rewards :D The stuff I'm buying now is all "this isn't retro!" stuff, but in 10 years time it will become interesting.
Hello Phil, I do understand where you are coming from , looking at prices of voodoo cards , top of the line 6800 7800 cards for win98se etc is insane what stuff goes for, I used to spend $$$ on new stuff but in the last few years have got into retro stuff , I get as much enjoyment out of it and there is more variety in graphics cards/sound cards of yesteryear than nowadays (only nvidia and AMD) . probably , like you, I just cant justify spending more than$AU 10-20 for a graphics card for a retro system, unless its something really unique or I really want it. I really liked the series you did where you asked viewers to vote on components for a build, maybe something like that based on hardware around about a certain year or maybe do 2 builds , using hardware you already have , 1 AMD and the other Intel of a certain period, sure to get opinions flying around!
Hello Phil, I do understand where you are coming from , looking at prices of voodoo cards , top of the line 6800 7800 cards for win98se etc is insane what stuff goes for, I used to spend $$$ on new stuff but in the last few years have got into retro stuff , I get as much enjoyment out of it and there is more variety in graphics cards/sound cards of yesteryear than nowadays (only nvidia and AMD) . probably , like you, I just cant justify spending more than$AU 10-20 for a graphics card for a retro system, unless its something really unique or I really want it. I really liked the series you did where you asked viewers to vote on components for a build, maybe something like that based on hardware around about a certain year or maybe do 2 builds , using hardware you already have , 1 AMD and the other Intel of a certain period, sure to get opinions flying around!
I have a Pentium 4 motherboard left over from an upgrade and I thought that maybe the old Pentium 4 motherboard could be used for a retro Windows 98 gaming PC build but finding chipset drivers was a nightmare and after weeks of trying to hunt down drivers I was unable to get anywhere with it, no audio and the video was the ugly 16 bit color although the USB worked...
I'm currently looking for a suitable Pentium III system... I also won a box of old AGP video cards on ebay, I did test them on the P4 running win98 but as usual I ran into the issue of not being able to find driver's for any of them.
With a Pentium III I'm more likely to get things to work natively under Windows 98SE
The problem I see with this video is the graphics card. If you're looking to build a retro gaming pc on a budget, I think top of line cards from a generation (such as the FX 5950) aren't going to be considered. While I know you were trying to show the raw power of each, I think you should pair it with a cheaper card (such as a GeForce 6200, Radeon X300, etc) and see how it performs there.
The video card was for the benchmarking as we are comparing CPUs, I'm sure I mentioned this. There are build videos on my channel if that's what you are interested in.
Thanks for the Video Phil I like the Pentium 4, The Pentium 3 Motherboards cost too much right now. the only problem i have is some of the newer Pentium 4 CPU`s have Hyper-Threading and Windows 98 does not have support. have you had any issues with this or do you just use the older P4`s that don`t have it?
Many BIOSes have an option to disable it. But even if the don't, Windows 98 just ignores the second thread :)
You can lose as much as half the performance of the CPU with HT enabled on Windows 98 if you can't turn it off. Not being able to disable HT is pretty rare in practice though, I only ever came across a handful of machines that couldn't turn HT off, mostly relegated to OEM machines.
I have an 845 chipset dell OptiPlex 520 with a Pentium 4 at 3.4 ghz, and an ATI 9200, how well would this work for any 98 game with everything maxed out?
The graphics card is the weak link here, but it should run games ok. Just don't run high resolutions or AA and you will be fine.
Would windows 98 be fully happy with that top end Pentium 4? As in stable, since I didn't see you mention the 3.4ghz model, I was just wondering. Also which 9000 series ati do you recommend? And would there be a way to have 98 see my integrated soundcard? I don't think I have more then one pci slot in that tower, its been awhile since I seen it due to injuries I'm not able to work on it atm.
See if you can find 98 drivers for that machine, being a DELL, should be easy to find out. A PCI sound card would make life easier. With the graphics card, the higher end AGP cards unfortunately can be a bit expensive. For ATI a Radeon 9500 or 9600 would be a lot faster. With Nviida you have more options, something from the GeForce 3, 4 or FX range works well. Best to do further research, there is a ton out there, what you want, but the 9200 is a good start, see how it goes. And you can downgrade the CPU to something with 2.4 or 2.6 GHz.
Hey Phil -- what would you say are the advantages of a Pentium 4 over a S939 Athlon for Windows 98?
They are very similar, the Intel chipset and its stability and compatibility are one reason. So you get SATA ports that work with modern gear, especially VIA chipsets struggle with this. But the Athlon has cooler running CPUs and you can play around with the multiplier.
Great video as always, I'm getting ready to build my own P4 Win98 retro machine, have all the parts already and it cost me 7€ total. P4 2.8 Ghz Northwood, MSI 875p chipset board, 2 x 512 MB DDR 400, GeForce 4 Ti 4200 and a SB Audigy (might get A3d/SB Live if it doesn't work).
When you were talking about it still being too fast even with caches disabled - wouldn't underclocking the RAM help a bit? With caches off the CPU needs to fetch everything from system memory all the time, so it should be impacted by it's speed more than normal. Or am I missing something?
Yea that should do something, and lowering the RAM timings.
I'm looking to build a high end windows 98 gaming machine and I'm not sure if I want to use a Pentium 3 or 4.
Both are great options, it should come down to price and availability!
I wonder how well a Northwood P4 HT 3.2GHz+Radeon 9000 iGP will work for 98SE gaming, since the Radeon does have 98SE drivers.
Is that on a notebook?
I've read that the Core series were a revised Pentium 3 architecture after they canned the shitty P4 netburst architecture. I wonder how the first Conroe CPUs would compare to these CPUs you looked at?
The Pentium M came before the Core series. Have a look at the performance for a Pentium M in a desktop board vs. a Pentium 4. Search for a review of the Asus CT-479 adapter. ;)
They were pretty low power though since they're mobile CPUs, but pretty interesting that was where the Core series actually came from :)
Yes, if I remember correctly, the Pentium M was based on the PIII Tualatin, and it later evolved into the Core-CPUs.
There were desktop boards (and adapters) available for the Pentium M. A 2,13 GHz M was usually faster than the 3.4GHz Prescott "Extreme Edition".
Nuts! 27 watt vs 90 watt and doing better at the same process size? No wonder P4 architecture was canned.
Phil - If you're able to get your hands on one, there are also Pentium M "on desktop" setups too : www.anandtech.com/show/1610 (and OC results: www.anandtech.com/show/1610/18 )
I heard of them, they are very premium and really not something I could use for more than just one video or so. So yea, likely not going to happen unless I find one super cheap.
Not mine - but here's a new socket 479 board: www.ebay.com/itm/Axiomtek-SBC86807-V2-0-Intel-Socket-479-Dual-LAN-Mini-ITX-Embedded-Motherboard-/182280770175 "make an offer" and processors (P-M 770) are as cheap as $4 shipped. Just add a DIMM. I believe all P-Ms are single channel. You should put a paypal link on your page ..
There any reason to get P3 or 4 instead of AMD? Are the motherboards better?
Hey Phil, do you know what Pentium IIIs are compatible with the SE440BX-2? I've been using a Pentium II 300 for a while in my Win98 computer and have been considering upgrading to a P3 for later games, but I don't know which ones are surefire compatible - I hear some of the later 1ghz CPUs are incompatible. What's the fastest I can get while still assuring that I won't have to worry about compatibility?
In theory all the chips with 100 FSB. But many good 440BX boards can be run at 133 FSB, which would enable even the 1 GHz Coppermine to run on them. People mod them to run Tualatins on them. at 133 FSB the 440BX is still faster than i815, but the later can reack 150 FSB easily.
Just have to watch out with the AGP bus, some graphics cards don't like the overclock.
I think the 100FSB models should be enough for me - I'm not trying to run anything super crazy on it, and if I want amazing performance I'll use my XP Celeron laptop for that. I just want a nice performance boost for some late 90s games like Battlezone and Heavy Gear
What can you say of a socket 754 amd64 for windows 98? Asus board with driver disk, but i had some blue screen crashing issues after installing drivers. Is it generally a no go in your opinion or just windows 98 acting up as always? Ended up with Me instead, but theres some dos compatability issue I've heard?
I've done videos on this topic, it worked well!
PhilsComputerLab oh, nice, thanks I'll watch that and try again
In what resolution have you tested the 3dMark2000? I reach 12200 points (default benchmark settings of 1024x768x16) with a 1575Mhz Tualatin, best memory timings, and Ti 4600 (Detonator 44.03 and 98 SE with SP 2.1e). For evidence, I will make a video in the near future. :)
I wouldn't trust 3DMark scores much, they depend a lot on the driver. 2001 SE is a lot more consistent.
In 2001 SE, the 5900XT is much better than the Ti 4600.
I am sure that you will have much better resolute on Win NT platforms then on Win 9x
Back in a day I and a friend of mine tested Serious Sam 1 on Pentium 3 500MHz Slot 128mb RAM and 32MB Geforce 3 TItanium ( I do not remember well the model)
And with Windows XP the game was perfect smooth on very high graphics,
but on Windows 95 the resolute where not so well.
The idea is for a Windows 98 and DOS machine, not XP.
i found a cheap intel d845 wn board + a p4 1.5ghz willamette, i wonder these would be good for games from the '95-'98 era?
Yea that should work just fine!
One question, i found a old IBM thinkpad T22. Runs on pentium 2 at round 600 or 900 MHz i forgot. Would that suit the good 98/dos gaming machine? ^^
I have a 775 Pentium D motherboard from Asus that has Windows 98 drivers ;)
I may install it today.. what turn me off though is i only have 2GB sticks of DDR2 and W98 is not friendly with that
Ah yes, I've seen 512MB DDR2 sticks, they should be super cheap as mist will chase higher capacities.
Some boards actually let you reduce the multiplier so it can be running at much lower speeds
I believe the Pentium 4 has a locked multiplier.
PhilsComputerLab well, I would have to check in some of the boards, but I remember having that option in the bios, some real cheap ones like Pc Chips and the like
Hello i have a question, for the hardware and driver knowledgeable, i got Win 95 up and running on a Pentium 4 "Asrock K7VT 4Apro motherborad", but i do not seem to find USB driver for the VIA chipset on it, maybe there is none and i should install Win 98SE?
Win 95 never correctly supported USB with any chipset. Win 98 or anything later will be fine.
you can run Windows 95 with PCem
At 8:58, Phil mentions the utility he usually uses to slow down the PC, but I can't quite make out what he says. Can someone please link/point me to it?
Some of the tools I use are SetMul and Throttle.
Thank you! I'm trying to get Scorched Planet (DOS) to run, but lowering it to the lowest multi (2,5 x 66 MHz) is too fast. On the other hand, disabling the caches makes it way too slow. Regardless of which option I choose in Throttle, it seems to have the same effect as disabling the caches. So I'll try SetMul.
DFI Lanparty PRO875B best pentium4 board ever made, the ABIT IC7-MAX3 next best.
What motherboard would be good for Pentium 3?
@@GalaxianGamer I'm talking about a Pentium 3 1400.
@@GalaxianGamer I'm currently finding parts so I can build a retro gaming PC.
Please, could I get a suggestion?
I've got an Athlon 64 rig, and I'd like to install Windows 98 on it. But the installation gets stuck at "Windows searching installed hardware" after copying the install files. I've got a Radeon X700SE graphics and overall a 2005 setup.
Should I seek a P4 PC instead? :
Is this a PCIe system?
PhilsComputerLab Thank you for response, Phill! Yup, it is. Even dual PCIe!
More specifially under the hood: AMD Athlon 64 4000+,
1 GB of DDR memory,
Mobo being ASUS A8N-SLI Premium (Socket 939) (with AC97 sound chip),
GPU being PCIe 256MB ATI Radeon x700 Series,
and a 74GB WD branded SATA hard drive.
And an ASUS CD burner.
Anticlimactic for a Windows 98 installation, I fear.
Ah yes, so I can see why this could cause issues. Firstly reduce the RAM, out of the box there is a 512MB limit. And PCIe, I've never tried 98 on one, all my systems are AGP. But try the RAM first!
PhilsComputerLab All right, sire! Thank you for help, I'll let you know whether the PCI-E card will work on Windows 98 - if removing a stick does the trick first, comrade! Thank you for your dedidative and enlightening videos, Phill.
You won't find official graphics drives for any PCI-E graphics cards on win 98; but you may found hacky inofficial ones.
I guess that the Pentium III-S oc'ed to 1.6 GHz would get performance between the P4 2.0A and the P4 2.4B, right?
I mean in the games where the P3-S is basically the same as the 1.6a
Pretty much. On average, my PIII-S @ 1575 benchmarks almost exactly like a P4 2.4A (that's the 400FSB version) on an i845E motherboard. That's with a 6800GT in both machines.
Why? I still have a few of my old Pentium III and Pentium 4 systems but I haven't touched them in years..
Were any of the P4's Hyperthreaded? And if so, was it enabled?
That came later!
from p4 2.8c northwood
ah
I have like, 4 Pentium 4 CPUS just sitting in a cabinet so it might actually be worth doing :)
Pentium III 1.4 tualitan still isn't as expensive as Pentium III 1.1 on eBay.
How is pentium 4 HT? Can HT be disabled in bios?
Heh, maybe it's time to take out my Abit IC-7G from storage. With a P4 Northwood B @ 2.66 and a Geforce 4MX440, it's a fine Windows 98 machine.
I wonder how can you even get an FPS higher than 35, given by Doom is capped at 35
I costs nothing for some new good capacitors when you comparing it to the cost of killing a piece of hardware. It only takes about 30 minutes to do and what you get is a PC which will be rock solid for years
What about running with the integrated soundcard and graphics?1