That's interesting, I made the jump in front of the camera a while ago. Maybe this video triggered a notification, who knows. But yea, more retro content going forward! Welcome back.
As a member of the Intel early access (IPLA) program I still have two working engineering samples of the P4 and I still remember the XDC 2000 (Willamette Developer Update) presentation in London where the prototypes and SSE2 was introduced to selected developers. It was the time Intel handed out "Validation platform systems" which basically meant you got a top of the line system with the latest engineering sample CPU. It was a fun time writing SSE2 code, so the P4 was not only part of my live but also part of my work and it was a time I will always gladly remember. Perhaps I should make a video about the prototype P4s? The early ES had an odd of-center die/IHS. Looks really unusual but wont go higher then 1Ghz (its unlocked). The later ES would go up to 1.4 Ghz and looks 'normal'. Is there any interest in this? I could add some coding insides as well.
@@the1990kman Oh I have some other prototypes in my closet as well. I wrote some of the DvD playback software for the Chromatic Research Mpact 1 and 2 cards which where later bought by ATI. Worked with almost every of the first and second gen 3d (de)accelerator cards back in the day, even an NV1 with some hand soldered connections (unfortunately that one is dead).
"LutzLegacyLab" is a new channel where I will show the P4 prototypes and share some insides on the Netburst architecture from a developers POV. There will be some more stuff about the P3, P2 and Pentium MMX I like to share as well.
Your videos are superb Phil. Smooth and relaxing, I usually watch them to get a mix of feelings of gone days but nice memories before going to bed. You are doing a great job honoring the accomplishments of the past with your setups and tests. It makes me remember how I dreamed of those technologies back in the days.
@@philscomputerlab The 1st 5500 FX that you showed - that aluminum cooler - these are chinese "refurbished" cards that have flooded the market in the past 10-ish or so years - seems like their typical salvage shoddy refurbish - mostly likely salvaged mem modules and GPU dies from already cooked video cards that are then baked on a GBA station and work exactly ..... 10 seconds until they fail again.
I found an old IBM thin client with a Pentinum 4 HT (HyperThreading) at a thrift store recently for $20 and I love it. The board supported both IDE and SATA so I was able to use a modern SSD along with a newer DVD drive. Also put an old 8mb ATI Rage XL in it in the only PCI slot. I love this thing! It originally did a fresh install of XP but now I might go to 98SE for the better DOS compatibility
@@philscomputerlab Well, it's also odd that some manufacturers went for a full blown desktop Pentium 4 CPU in some laptops, with the heat and battery life implications that had. Admittedly that might have been only the case with some OEM generic models, like the one I have stored somewhere, and not with major brands.
I have a bunch of these in my basement - I'm waiting for them to get more attention before I rebuild them and put them on eBay ;) - Still, I have sold some IBM ThinkCentres with high end video cards for $500, 5-6 years ago already.
RDRAM...now that deserves its own video. Had a 2.6ghz P4 machine with 2GB of RDRAM in it my mom got from her job, it was set up for professional photo editing - even had a wonderful CRT to go with it - The LaCie Electron Blue IV 22.
Remember rdram also costing so much more and then it got phased out which pretty much limited the upgrade path for the family computer as the parents didnt want to spend so much to upgrade.
@@cmelft2463 And that is why RDRAM is still expensive. It was costly back then, so few people bought it. Which means there isn't a big market of used parts.
My first CPU was P4 1.6 GHz Northwood. Such a great CPU. I remember oveclocking it on GA-8IPE1000 at a rock-solid 2.4Ghz with only a minor bump in voltage.
P4s are a great "starter" retro rig. They aren't the best at anything, but they're at least able to run most things and the fact that you can find them for basically free is a huge plus. Ever office building on the planet probably has some old P4 Dells they forgot about in a closet somewhere.
Yeah, the Pentium III and Athlon platforms are sought after and not super cheap, Athlon XP hit the nostalgia of "my old gaming rig", Core 2, K8 and K10 chips are still usable for some modern tasks. But the Pentium 4 has such a bad reputation that nobody wants them, same with the Geforce FX. But with the right expectations, they make for a great, affordable retro setup. A small Northwood and an FX 5200 Ultra are great 98/XP dual boot systems. I wouldn't go for RDRAM, that was expensive and still is, but a Northwood 1.6A and a gig of DDR-400 would make for a neat setup. The 1.6A could easily go to 2.4 GHz if needed and the 2.4C will hit 3.2 GHz just fine. And any chip around 3 GHz will easily get to 4 For flexibility I'd say a model with a small multi and fast FSB would be best. The multi is usually not user-changable, but clocking up or down to reach other speeds is possible.
Well that’s a good system for the year back in 2000 I had amd athlon 850mhz 128 mb ram and GeForce 2 32mb felt like a super computer in 2000 but games evolved fast back then just the next year or 2 games were much much more demanding.
I have a socket 423 system with the 1.7GHz P4. Paired it with a Geforce4 Ti 4200 and Vortex2 sound card. It's an excellent DOS/98 PC. I've been using it for the vast majority of my retro games for about 5 years without any issues. I think the motherboard is the Asus P4T.
Yet another brilliant video! I am a Pentium 4 fanatic myself. I was fortunate to have the best P1, P2 and P3 CPUs and yes, I admit that Pentium 4 A and B struggled with the P3 1.4GHz. Yes, in some games and applications the Athlons could have been better. However, my Pentium 4 2.4 GHz (without HT) has never let me down. It is with me since 11 Nov 2002. I still use it 2-3 times a week for a quick retro game. With the AGPx8 Ati Radeon 4650 1GB GPU it is capable to run Civilization 5 with up to 30 fps. DOOM3, Farcry 1, Battlefield 1942 and 2, Flight Simulator X etc. All pre-2006 game run at max details. Yes, P4s are running hot. Yes, they don't have a throttle down feature. However, I love it! I enjoy your channel so much!
My first PC had a Pentium 4 but it was a later one running at 2.4 GHz. I had it paired with a GeForce 4 Ti4600 and it ran everything I played at the time great. I even played through Half-Life 2 on that system when I first got it and it worked well, although not at the highest detail. I had XP on that system and never tried 98.
Intel was in Fry's electronics demo'ing the new 1.4ghz system with Quake 3. Was so impressed I plopped down my credit card and got the motherboard/cpu/ram combo. Prior to my P4, upgrades were almost yearly. I think I managed to keep mine running up until 2006 or so, when the first Core2Duo's came out. My system at the time was pretty speedy. I had an Adaptec SCSI controller, a 15k RPM drive. I clutched onto my Glide graphics as long as I could.
Hi Phil, nice to see you again playing and enjoying with your retro machines, back then I only had eyes for AMD, nowadays I don't mind at all about brands I try to enjoy every machine for what it can be.
Had a Pentium III and that thing was amazing, upgraded to an Athlon 2800+ and seeing that against a P4 I stuck with AMD ever since, even FX for god knows how many years (Linux did help it's performance lol), finally Zen dropped, 2600 and now on a 5700x, I'll keep this for a few years as I guess games will hammer the GPU more than CPU in future if Vulkan becomes more adopted... I no longer code so the need for cores is no longer there...
well done, enjoyable again. thanks phil! i got a p4 641 for my upcoming win 98 build, gotta replace a couple caps on the evga 790i ultra, then find a couple evga 8800 somethings for an attempt at sli.
My experience with Pentium 4 was (and still is) with my Toshiba Satellite a75 S211. I got it second hand around 2011, and I still use it today to play retro games. It is hooked up to my CRT TV via the S-video out, and playing emulators on a TV just looks and feels right. I ran through some issues with the CPU overheating and shutting off the system entirely, but I discovered that was because one of the fans had just died. I replaced it with a used (and rather noisy) one, and it kickss ass beautifully! Keep up the great content!
In 2000 I was still rocking a P3 500mhz and a voodoo 3. I had a P4 2.8ghz and the FX 5600 in 2003. That rig treated me well for years until I upgraded to the Athlon x2 5600 and an 8800GT in 2007. I was super broke in those days and it literally took me years to buy upgrades. I remember complaining about 150$ graphics cards. Seems like a bad joke nowadays. Recently bought a RTX4080 for 1000$. Ugh.
in 2000 , i had a Celeron 1.8 Mhz , 256 of Sdram , a 40 Gb HDD , and i played with an integrated S3 ships on board , a PC bought by my dad (may him rest in peace) at that time , i live in north Africa , Algeria to be precise , at that time and even today , gaming PC is a luxury , to give you an idea , an RTX 4080 cost 16 month of the minimum salary , but since i got a job , i ,embarked into an upgrading road continually (i only skipped the FERMI architecture) , i have an RTX 3070 TI for now , the 4000 series is still too expensive and power hungry and not really worth the upgrade for my knowledge , peace !
Back then I used the family pc. Was lucky to have an athlon xp 2200+ and 256 mb ram on top of a geforce 2 Mx 64 mb. Man those were fun times playing medal of honour allied assault online haha
Great video Phil! Format was great and thanks for running through those games. I picked up a brand new Asus P4B (478) and paired it with a 1.8ghz P4 running 98. I've also got P4 650HT running xp, and some spare P4 630's. It's always fun playing with P4 machines!
The first computer I built for myself out of parts was a P4. The capacitor plague took it before its 4th birthday, but I will always have some nostalgia for these hot beasts.
I remember me with my friend got to test P3 Copermine 800MHz and P4 1.3GHz - P4 was a little bit snappier when load was low, but if you wanted to do it "the modern game" (we where in to Ultima Online), so open browser, Ultima and Winamp running at the same time - and that really punished P4 big times, while P3 was just chugging like a king!
Thank you for the new format Phil. Artention to detail is always a BIG+. I can't believe you actually owned a P4 back in the day. I owned an AMD Athlon setup initially with a Duron 600 and eventually an Athlon 1400. That build lasted until my Intel Core second gen build- you must have been REALLY well off to go Pentium 4 at a time when it cost like 4x more and consistently lost to AMD... not that it is bad to be wealthy but P4 was really flexing financial muscle back in the day.
It was a Pentium 4 2.6 with DDR. So it was much later and competition was strong between Intel and AMD. PCs were not expensive at the time, it was very competitive with new things coming out all the time!
I had a Pentium 4 back in the day. It was a 3.8 GHz Prescott model. I had to buy an aftermarket cooler because the one it came with could not keep up when playing "heavy" games (GTA San Andreas was OK, but Oblivion ran poorly). This was also the time of cold cathode lights and case modding. It served me well until I eventually got a Core 2 Duo some years later.
I had to get an aftermarket Zalman cooler for my Prescott, because it gave off so much heat. This was my last intel for years and started to run with the AMD Athlons for years, until Intel got it's game back with the Core i7.
You were lucky I used Prescott till 2013 just for browsing the web & TH-cam,kept it running 24x7 I think that's to blame my mental disorder the immense heat in Arab desert.
@@S9uareHead They never released the 4.0 GHz model, but it was planned. But then, you could just as well do it yourself. Get a 3.0 or 3.2 GHz model and clock it yourself. And since oc goes over the FSB and the architecture really benefits from more bandwith, you'd end up with a faster model than what would be released.
@@frankg.2949 Intel became super competitive in 2006 with their Core 2 chips. Better IPC than Athlon 64 and the ability to clock higher. K10 could keep up, but that time Intel had already released Nehalem. I'd say around 2007-2018 was Intel's great time with unrivaled performance. Only Zen2 was able to catch up and beat them.
Back in the day I was a die hard AMD fan, but nowadays I've sort of warmed up to Intel too. I have some spare parts, so maybe it's time to put together a couple of Intel retro rigs as well.
You could totally do the benchmarking of old. See if there are things that have changed and how they scale. That would also hit the retro market quite well.
Love the video, would be great to do a side by side of this P4 1.4Ghz with the P3 1.4Gz (Tualatin) with the same Video Card and other parts and see how they compare. Personally, I run a P3 1.4Ghz with a Geforce 4 4600 and the Orpheus II. Love the setup, its so flexible, old DOS all the way through the early 2000's all on 98SE.
A 1400 Tualatin can easily keep pace with a 1.6-1.8 GHz Northwood and in some cases even a 2.0-2.4 GHz model. The 1400 Willamette is about as fast as a 1000 Coppermine or 1200 Tualatin Celeron.
Interesting Video. I did not know that the early P4 had such a bad reputation back then. My first gaming pc with a CPU in the GHz range was a Pentium 4, 1,5 GHz with intel 850gbc mainboard and Asus v7100 as a graphics card and I was blown away. But I was coming from P2 266 MHz system so this was not hard. I do not have the system anymore but I will go back into Windows 98 gaming again and want to make super high end system I could never afford back then.
Pentium 4 was a marketing child. Who could say no do commercials going on about the "2.4 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor", when the closest Athlon had 1.8 GHz.
Wide availability for basically free is a big plus as well. Athlon XPs were better in pretty much every way at the time, but good luck finding a working cheap one today.
@@PhAyzoN You can find plenty of Athlons XP, but mostly not that higher models and also, later P4 had dual channel which makes some difference. Some decent 3 GHz P4 is perfect platform for Win 98-XP retro gaming build. Ofcourse there is nothing wrong with Athlon XP, but games back in the time were designed for HW which didn't exist yet, so when you want to play some 1999 game on ultra setting in 1280x1024, you need 3 GHz P4, all later AGP GPUs are bottlenecked even by 3GHz P4 so with some Athlon XP for socket 462, it's pointless to install better GPU than like 6600GT and even that will be bottlenecked.
i was thinking about building such a machine . my pc back them used a P2 so its soo dlow even for retro. what kind of gpu and other componebts would I need
Happy Friday Phil! I love the Pentium 4 platform. I just built a P4 system as a WinXP gaming rig. It uses an nForce chipset but works grand under XP. I do have a couple Dell socket 478 builds as well that dual boot 98 and XP, and they run perfectly including dual channel DDR 400 ram. I do have one socket 423 board that uses Rambus, but it’s a little finicky so I never used it in a full build. Thanks for sharing Phil!
I don't like nForce chipsets, I always had problems with that. For socket 478 boards, I prefer Intel 865 chipsets, it supports prescott and DDR400 and it's reliable, no problems with late AGP cards etc....
You know Phil, I was there back in the days of MS-DOS, the IBM 5150, had a 8mhz 286 with VGA as my first IBM compatible PC and had an Amiga 2000 with 3 megs of RAM (!) and a 500 megabyte SCSI HD. OC'd a Celeron 300a to 450 mghz and had a 486 66 dx with a Mediatek Pro Audio Spectrum 16 Pro. Your channel brings back memories of good times. Thank you!
@@philscomputerlab It wasn't until things kind of stalled late in the Pentium 4 era that my enthusiasm kind of waned. I had a Core 2 system and a Phenom x4 that was in use until 2020, but Windows 10 kind of commoditized things after 2015.
That's a really awesome project I'm actually thinking of going with a P4 (S478) for my retro 98 machine for some old Star Trek Games for the more authentic feel tbh! :3 My first proper PC was the AthlonXP which ran 98 and XP very very well, I have an ATI HD 3650 512MB AGP that I'm looking to use as the old Catalyst drivers I remember worked wonderfully for the games I played back in the day :)
You was very lucky if that HD3650 AGP worked without problems, these late ATI GPUs for AGP slots were very problematical. I have one HD4650 now and in some MBs it doesn't even give you image (some socket 462 MBs), I had even problem in sc754 MB, it kind of worked, but there were some problems. Only platform where it works without any issues are late sc 478 MBs, so Pentium 4 plaftorm.
I like the Pentium 4, I grew up with it. My first was a 2Ghz Northwood which was in the family PC for what felt like forever but was probably about 4 or 5 years. It replaced a 350mhz Pentium II. Played so many great games on it with no issues and the performance was really good compared to all my friend's PCs and consoles at the time. I eventually did an in-socket upgrade to a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 around 2006, before building my first PC later that year based on a socket 775 3.4Ghz cedar mill Pentium 4. Thought that was awesome until I upgraded to a Q9650 in 2009; biggest upgrade I've ever done by the way. I now have two Windows XP gaming PCs with Pentium 4 extreme editions. One is a socket 478 3.2Ghz version, the other is a socket 775 3.4Ghz version.
I still have a 3.0 GHz Cedar Mill here, and while it can reach 4 GHz fine, it will get completely destroyed by a single core Conroe Celeron. I have a soft spot for LGA775, the fact that a 3 GHz single core Pentium 4 (or downclocked to 2.4 GHz) can run on the same platform as a 4 GHz Core 2 Quad with about 9 times the performance is just crazy. And overclocking still takes some work. It isn't just more vcore and upping the multi. Everything is done through the FSB, so northbridge clock, memory clock, memory strap, etc are all connected.
@@HappyBeezerStudios I've still got my Cedar Mill 641 that I bought back in 2006. Great CPU, I overclocked it to 5Ghz once, don't think it was stable but it was still mind blowing back then. I have found that the Pentium 4 Gallatin extreme edition is slightly faster in games though so that's why I run it in my retro rig. I learnt on the 775 platform and like you have a soft spot for it. The first 3 PCs that I built were all 775 so it still feels natural to me to do FSB overclocking. I didn't upgrade to anything else until 2014 when I got a 4690k.
Pentium 4 Northwood models aged better than Prescott cores as they were built on a more efficient node and by the time it was released, dual channel DDR motherboards and chipsets were abundant thus giving people a cheaper option to RDRAM (SDRAM was holding back early Pentium 4 chips). During this time I was on the Socket A platform with the AMD Duron 1.3 GHz (Morgan core) and soon after upgraded to the Athlon XP 1800+ on an nForce 1 platform (which a year later would become an Athlon XP 2500+ OC'd to 3200+ levels on an nForce 2 Ultra platform).
Still running a P4-2.8HT with 1GB ram and a SSD caddy so I can (drive swap) run DOS, win98, winXP and even Vista on it. It has 2x voodoo2 cards, ATI 9800, SBlive!.. Works great for all my retro gaming needs from mid 90's to mid 2000's. Cheers!
I found a pentium 4 at a flea market for 10 dollars. and thank you Phil for your awesome web page and your guidance.. playing old games from my childhood has been a blast..
I wanted an Athlon XP for my Windows 98 machine but I'm having no luck with the motherboards. Since I have several P4 machines I went with a P4 2.66Ghz on an Asus P4S8X-X, GeForce FX 5600 128MB and Sound Blaster Live SB0060, so my current setup is very similar to the one you tested, except for DDR instead of RDRAM, 2 real IDEs with 80GB and 320GB, and dual booting Win98 and Win2000 on the same partition 🙂
I've bought a lot of sc 462 motherboards in last few months for few bucks here in Czech Republic, not always in great condition, but it always worked. I can't imagine living in country where you have only eBay with their crazy prices, those worldwide sellers are totaly crazy. Sometimes it's enough to just visit some local computer store and ask if they have some "old trash" and very often they have and they are happy that you will take it for free. 🙂
Makes me wonder why Windows 2000. Might be just for period correctness, but there isn't anything that 2000 does that XP can't do either, but with support for some newer software. Yes, it means going to "classic" layout, but should do fine. On my 933 MHz Pentium 3 build I'M running 98 SE and XP on 256 MB RAM and XP is just fine. In fact, with my CRT it feels snappier than my modern machine with modern parts.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Wrong, I thought that XP is just reskined 2000 for a long time, but even when core is almost the same, there is massive difference in compatibility with old games and software. Win 2000 has advantages of NT, it knows NTFS file system, it's stable, it knows USB 2.0 AND compatibility with Win 9x games is much better than in XP for some reason. Try for example AvP1 or NFS 5, both games are bugged in XP, but work totaly fine in 2000. Ofcourse you can use Win 98 or ME, but 2000 has drivers for HW to like 2005, so you can build superior computer for these late Win 9x games. Test it, I am not kidding, compatibility in Win 2000 with old games is much better and it's better to play DOS games in DOS box now, so I don't really need actual Win 9x based OS.
@@HappyBeezerStudios The explanation is very simple. I have 3 retro machines, the older one runs Win3+1+Win95+NT4 (3Dfx games), the 2nd one runs Win98SE+Win2K, the 3rd one runs WinXP+Win7 (DX9 and above). Basically for nostalgia since I've used all these OSes extensively over the years, also because dual/triple booting requires less physical machines 🙂
I was an early adopter, with a 1.5GHz Willamette P4 on socket 423. It was not great and there were many regrets. Especially since socket 423 was a dead end.
Willamette was sort of a proof of concept. Completely inferior to Tualatin, but functional. Northwood was the height of the architecture. Massive increases in clocks (and thus performance) and unbeatable (at the time) in some tasks. Prescott lenghened the pipeline, reduced IPC but couldn't balance that out with even higher clocks. It was pretty much unable to do what it was designed for. Cedar Mill was pretty much just a shrink of Prescott, but fixed the power draw and is a decent ship. Pretty much what Prescott should've been from the start.
Its insane. I used this EXACT same setup until 2013 (was the family computer). I overclocked the P4 to 1.6ghz (i had no idea what i was doing) and somehow burnt out my fx 5200 at some point trying to swap it into something else. It was a horrible machine but it gave me my love for older computers and introduced me to loads of older games (such as system shock 2!). Still have the computer today. Super cool video.
The P4 is a perfect example of when Intel allowed their marketing department to fully drive the engineering. The goal was sky high clock speeds at all costs, hence the super deep pipeline and other design decisions. It's a CPU line that it easily overlooked these days in large part because the chips that came before and after it from both AMD and Intel were so much better in many ways. For me the P4 generation is when I went over to AMD for a while. I had been with Intel through the Slot 1 and Socket 370 gens after spending the entire Socket 7 generation with AMD chips. Then in 2001 I attended a pop-up AMD Roadshow event in Chicago IL at the launch of the Athlon XP line and won a MSI motherboard and Athlon XP 1800+ CPU which at the time was their fastest chip. So I stuck with AMD through the Athlon XP days. Later on I had a Barton core Athlon XP 2500+ CPU that I had overclocked to 3200+ speeds which served me well until the time when the later Core 2 and AM2 based Athlons were common. I did end up using a lot of P4 based machines at work though (I was an IT contractor for the US Army then) and quite a few of them were dog slow, especially when they got hot and thermal throttled. A P4 was fairly well behaved in a stable temperature environment, but put one in a warehouse or factory setting and boy were they a pain! I was so glad when the Core 2 based machines came in to replace them.
At that time Intel didn't know P4 wouldn't scale that well in terms of frequency and that it would encounter major headwind in the form of TDP. AMD was worse. It knew about the problems of P4 but still decided to release Bulldozer.
@@Alex-df4lt NetBurst, Bulldozer, POWER6, all designs aimed to go to super high clocks, replaced by lower clocking, high IPC designs, that managed to reach the same actual clocks. Yes, in 2007, just when Intel went away from their GHz race, IBM decided to release 5 GHz CPUs. And not only that, POWER6 was in-order.
My first computer had Pentium 4 that was almost 20 years ago. It was the era of Windows XP. Back then 512mb can make your computer so fast. Fun fact: I still have the original computer case.
That Geforce FX5500: Looks like the capacitor top left is swollen. Might be a bad angle, but normally that caused the glitching and instability. This bring back so many memories! We had a 1.7 Pentium 4 on Intel Desktop Board. Once I replaced all the caps on a glitching motherboard with onboard graphics. It actually worked, and the PC was usable again.
Hi, Phil. Thanks for the great Video. I saved an Win98-machine until this day and now it itches to go through all the installation to try some old stuff and show it to my nephew. To the graphic-problems of your first card: It may be the light, but some of the capacitors seems to bulge. Could be just voltage instability, that a swap would fix. Greetings, Carsten.
your FX 5500 seems to have 3 swollen capacitors on it, replace them and it will probably work fine again, hell replace all 6, even the other 3 that look fine probably no longer have their original capacity
I was using a Pentium 4 670 model until spring 2012 as my daily driver. It only struggled with video over 720p but other than that it still performed fine. Obviously gaming would be another story.
Coming from a family of Mac users, our very first windows machine was a Dell with a 3.2 ghz P4 and Radeon 9800 running XP. It was a heck of a machine and I have great memories of endless hours in Simcity 4 and the Sims. It got me started on digital music too, syncing up my iPod at the time. It never occurred to me to try Win98 on it - I wish I still had the machine, though I retain the Radeon.
The Athlon was kind of the enthusiast's choice, put the p4 always just worked. I liked the stability and the compatibility, less drivers issues on intel.
That's exactly what I am saying for almost 20 years, I never liked that AMD fanatic army. Yes, Athlon XP was more energy efficient, but it was not THAT good as they were saying and CPU alone is not everything, you neeed to look even at motherboards and sc 462 motherboards were so outdated, you still had to set FSB manualy, so some people had just basic CPU frequency because they didn't know what to do with that, it still didn't have dual channel and compatibility with late AGP cards was pretty bad. Some later sc 462 MBs didn't even have USB keyboard option in bios and I remember USB keyboards were already pretty common in like 2003, Intel MBs supported this already on most of socket 370 boards. Ofcourse USB keyboard worked in bios and on post screen, but it didn't work on "press any key to continue" screen while installing Windows. 🙂 But if you like sado-maso, then sc462 is a perfect platform for you. Some late decent sc 478 MB is the best platform for superiour Win 9x retro gaming computer.
Really good to see you in front of the camera, i feel it really makes a channel more personal so it's a good move. I also like the bigger focus on the games, Screamer 4x4 was one i played to death in the early 2000's and it's got to my one of my favourite retro games.
I was putting a new machine together from scratch in early 2002, and the Pentium 4 1.7GHz was the current one at the time if I remember correctly, but I chose to go with a Celeron 1200 Tualatin CPU, due to people saying the Pentium was still being out performed by the Pentium III. The gap between the PIII and Celeron model was not massive at the time, so I saved some money instead.
P4 3.2 clocked to 4.0, 7950 GT, 4 gigs of Corsair Ram, Asus board, don't remember the chipset right now, and a couple of highspeed drives in raid... Good times. Still have a few old P4 machines laying around. Creative sound card with Z5500 speakers... liked my old P4 computers. I have an old 3.4 extreme edition, that would only run 3.6, and a 7800GS Golden Sample with the unauthorized 7950's chipset. This video makes me want to play around with that old hardware.
I worked on many P4 machines in college. We had the Dell OptiPlex GX260/270/280 machines. On occasion we'd have some bad caps or even bad CPU's. Not all of the machines had the same warranty -- Gold support would give us whatever we said we needed. Regular support made us test everything with them on the phone even if we already knew what was wrong.
Excellent vid as always, Phil! Been watching your vids for years and YEARS, and I'm SOOOO HAPPY that you FINALLY started showing your face! I really hated it all those years NOT KNOWING what you looked like! You OFTEN talk about how sought after high end PIIIs are, and I have the ultra-rare socket 7 1 GHz (?), which I haven't used for years and years. I tried to find one of those for YEARS, and when I FINALLY got one, I was OVER THE MOON! Now it just sits and does nothing. Maybe someday it'll be worth a million dollars and I can sell it and retire a rich woman??? I also have a BUNCH of P4s, which I used to use the heck out of, but haven't been touched for prob a decade at least. I also used to have TONS of old vid cards (like the 5200), but they had to go when space became a prob. Unfortunately, they were all RECYCLED, and not SOLD to people who would covet them. Sigh. Anyway, LOVE your vids even tho I don't do retro PC stuff anymore! Brings back soooo many MEMORIES for me! Cheers, mate!
I have this board and ram (ATX version) for sale somewhere (not trying to advertise so not saying where).. lol.. My test bench card is a 5700LE, super cool to have you testing on hardware that I have and have tested myself. Your videos motivated me to get out my old hardware from storage and muck around with it again. Good video.
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEES TA! I played that for YEARS over a 56k modem with friends! I was even in a clan! I actually bought the CD recently to play on my 233 MMX (which is what I played it on at the time - may have been a 200, that was 25 years ago). The game is pretty sweet. I recall you needed a lot of RAM for the larger maps.
Oh boy, I think it will struggle on the 233 MMX, at least that's what I found when testing on a Celeron 266. Even a Pentium II was struggling a little when there are many units on the screen and you play at a high resolution with a large view. TA is amazing! I find it hard to play other games, it is so well done, slick and smooth.
@@philscomputerlab I recall it was a show stopping game - Won some awards in 1997 as well. I had 128 Mb of RAM in my system, and for sure I had a Voodoo (not sure if 3DFX game) so that helped. There was times when it lagged despite that. IIRC the min. requirements were P120 or 133, so I felt pretty safe at 233 ;) My friend played it on his 266, there wasn't much difference in game play. Hundreds of hours spent over the years - we played it on MPlayer into the 2000s. Playing over a 56k connection, some games specifically banned flash tanks because they would lag out the game and keep shooting well after they were "destroyed". I also remember kidnapping the commander with an Atlas, and avoiding FLAK and rocket launchers by repeatedly clicking all my planes so they stack up, then using the minimap to send them into the enemy's camp "off map", only to change the target 2-3 seconds later. It was hard to do but extremely effective when done right. That and making the Big Bertha shoot twice its range by aiming directly in front of it ;) Oh and the expandability - so many 3rd party packs... Such a great game.
The Wayback Machine actually does have this board's download page archived. The chipset driver you used is way newer than the one it lists (3.20.1008), and the BIOS version you have is already the latest (P05).
Great video as all your others! Bit late on watching this video, sorry! 😋 I really loved my P4 machine, first platform I bought myself with money from work. I don't remember which P4 I had, but it was the 478 socket for sure. I think it was at that time I had an Geforce 2 Ti/VX from Inno3D. I think I used this setup in Windows XP also, but that time was around senior high school, so there were lots of other things to think about, so I don't remember completely. Anyhow, so fun to see you feature Total Annihilation - it was one of my favourite games back then. Had a cracked version at that time, but I've actually purchased a real copy on CD with the expansions late last year. Love the video! Can't wait for next one ❤
Totally agree, it wasn't until many, many years later that I heard that NetBurst was flawed in some way. Mine (Pentium 4 630 @ 3.0GHz) certainly never gave me any grief at the time.
I did a video about this recently and contacted a few SSD manufacturers. They assured me it is not an issue with modern SSDs. So now I just use them and don't worry about it.
Hey Phil - awesome video. Long live the P4! My family computer from back in 2003 was a P4 and it served us well. Lots of fond memories playing counterstrike and talking to friends on MSN messenger. I built my win98 rig using a P4 after watching some of your other videos, and used a similar intel board to this (Intel D865GBF). I got it NOS so it came with the driver disc (and no bad caps!). I'm kind of new to this, but I was wondering if it would be helpful for me to upload an iso of this disc for others, and if so where I should upload it to?
Still own a P4 651 (LGA 775) based Widows XP system that was the family PC from 2007 to 2012, older platforms tend to stick around a bit longer in Latin America. I still use it once in a blue moon, to go over some of the media I downloaded back in my teens, during the wild west phase of the internet.
I have a similar config, built 5 or 6 yrs ago, with 2.2GHz P4 and Radeon 9600xt on a red MSI board with the same amount of RDRAM. Put WinXP on it, but it seems it's much more fun with win98. Will try it in the next few days. My next config is a dual core pentium with radeon x1600. It is only a few yrs older chronologically than the P4, but the performance gap is huge. Amazing increase in clock speed and overall those days. Great video as always!
Great to start the weekend with new Win98 video from Phil :) BTW. which DirextX and NVidia drivers version you have used? I have never managed to get Screamer 4x4 working properly on my Win98 P4/FX5600 build with DX9 and NV78 driver set. It was constatly having some Z-buffer issue having objects overlapping with each other :(
So DirectX was version 9, the one that comes with the linked Audigy drivers for the Live! GeForce driver version I'm sure is shown or mentioned, version 56. something 🙂
The game supports OoenGL, Direct 3D and Glide. I used OpenGL it works faster on NVIDIA cards slower in Radeon. Check the game folder you will find different executables ...
At the time I did almost went to the Pentium 4 route. And in fact I did get the P4 motherboard, but with Asus CT-479 adapter and with a Pentium M socket 479 mobile chip. It was mostly faster than any of the Pentium 4 chips. I first had it with Pentium M 755 and later upgraded it to the Pentium M 780. The graphics card what I used came from Gainward 7800GS+ Golden sample 512MB. It was actually a 7900GT but in AGP! I still have that computer and use it when I feel like playing some retro games.
First real CPu was a P4 3.0 with Hyperthreading, I lapped it, got a beefy cooler, and clocked the hell out of it; think I hit 4.2 tops, but I remeber when I finally completed an OCCT run at 4GHZ I genuinely jumped around the room with joy, was a genuinely good CPU that brought one of my more memorable experiences building computers as a teen.
Overclocking P4 3GHz did a pretty high difference in FPS, late AGP GPUs were bottlenecked by P4 and games in like 2006-2008 were already designed for C2D. Even 2004 FarCry needs C2D to run with stable 60+ FPS, it's impossible to get with P4 in 1280x1024 with high details.
@@Pidalin Hah, I know; FC was one of my main benchmarks at the time; along with a pencil modded X800 All-in-wonder running XT bios I got Farcry running at a rate I was happy with at the time, but 60 fps was something I wouldn't be in search of for a long time.
@@K3NnY_G I still don't understand for what HW they designed those games. Look at for example our Czech Mafia game from 2002, even with P4 3GHz and HD4650, it's dropping to 30 FPS in city, how could people play that in 2002? I actually remember how, but it's still crazy how we played it back in the day, like 640x480, super low details and having 25 FPS. 😀
I found duron 1.3GHz with a 6200 turbo cache in a skip, i tried an athlon 2100+ and it worked and then a 2700+ which worked as well, along with a 9800 Pro card. Runs 98 SE perfectly. It's damn fast, stupid overkilll. Has an ISA slot too, i put an awe64 value in and works in native dos.
Triple buffering basically uses, as the name suggests, three instead of two framebuffers. So if you can't keep your vsync target, you won't drop to half the framerate.
First time I am seeing Phil's face and wow he does not look like I imagined. He looks like a tough German football hooligan, not a retro PC nerd. 😄
Yes, we nerds, are dangerous 😂
Sounded like a chinaman to me ha
That's interesting, I made the jump in front of the camera a while ago. Maybe this video triggered a notification, who knows. But yea, more retro content going forward! Welcome back.
@@philscomputerlab same here. Been busy with life i somehow forgot about this amazing channel
Bit harsh? 😄
As a member of the Intel early access (IPLA) program I still have two working engineering samples of the P4 and I still remember the XDC 2000 (Willamette Developer Update) presentation in London where the prototypes and SSE2 was introduced to selected developers. It was the time Intel handed out "Validation platform systems" which basically meant you got a top of the line system with the latest engineering sample CPU. It was a fun time writing SSE2 code, so the P4 was not only part of my live but also part of my work and it was a time I will always gladly remember. Perhaps I should make a video about the prototype P4s? The early ES had an odd of-center die/IHS. Looks really unusual but wont go higher then 1Ghz (its unlocked). The later ES would go up to 1.4 Ghz and looks 'normal'. Is there any interest in this? I could add some coding insides as well.
I say give it a go. Linus made a video about the prototype Voodoo 5 6000 gpu, so I think even a Pentium 4 prototype will be interesting to someone.
@@the1990kman Oh I have some other prototypes in my closet as well. I wrote some of the DvD playback software for the Chromatic Research Mpact 1 and 2 cards which where later bought by ATI. Worked with almost every of the first and second gen 3d (de)accelerator cards back in the day, even an NV1 with some hand soldered connections (unfortunately that one is dead).
@@lutzgrosshennig Very nice!
i'd kill to see those prototype units!!!
"LutzLegacyLab" is a new channel where I will show the P4 prototypes and share some insides on the Netburst architecture from a developers POV. There will be some more stuff about the P3, P2 and Pentium MMX I like to share as well.
Your videos are superb Phil. Smooth and relaxing, I usually watch them to get a mix of feelings of gone days but nice memories before going to bed. You are doing a great job honoring the accomplishments of the past with your setups and tests. It makes me remember how I dreamed of those technologies back in the days.
Thank you!
@@philscomputerlab The 1st 5500 FX that you showed - that aluminum cooler - these are chinese "refurbished" cards that have flooded the market in the past 10-ish or so years - seems like their typical salvage shoddy refurbish - mostly likely salvaged mem modules and GPU dies from already cooked video cards that are then baked on a GBA station and work exactly ..... 10 seconds until they fail again.
I found an old IBM thin client with a Pentinum 4 HT (HyperThreading) at a thrift store recently for $20 and I love it. The board supported both IDE and SATA so I was able to use a modern SSD along with a newer DVD drive. Also put an old 8mb ATI Rage XL in it in the only PCI slot. I love this thing! It originally did a fresh install of XP but now I might go to 98SE for the better DOS compatibility
That's a keeper! Usually thin clients have low powered VIA or AMD chips. Very interesting they went with a Pentium 4 HT.
@@philscomputerlab Well, it's also odd that some manufacturers went for a full blown desktop Pentium 4 CPU in some laptops, with the heat and battery life implications that had. Admittedly that might have been only the case with some OEM generic models, like the one I have stored somewhere, and not with major brands.
Antix
I have a bunch of these in my basement - I'm waiting for them to get more attention before I rebuild them and put them on eBay ;) - Still, I have sold some IBM ThinkCentres with high end video cards for $500, 5-6 years ago already.
RDRAM...now that deserves its own video. Had a 2.6ghz P4 machine with 2GB of RDRAM in it my mom got from her job, it was set up for professional photo editing - even had a wonderful CRT to go with it - The LaCie Electron Blue IV 22.
Remember rdram also costing so much more and then it got phased out which pretty much limited the upgrade path for the family computer as the parents didnt want to spend so much to upgrade.
@@cmelft2463 And that is why RDRAM is still expensive. It was costly back then, so few people bought it. Which means there isn't a big market of used parts.
My first CPU was P4 1.6 GHz Northwood. Such a great CPU. I remember oveclocking it on GA-8IPE1000 at a rock-solid 2.4Ghz with only a minor bump in voltage.
Yes, all P4s from 1.6 up to 2.2 can run at 2.4 with the stock cooler.
P4s are a great "starter" retro rig. They aren't the best at anything, but they're at least able to run most things and the fact that you can find them for basically free is a huge plus. Ever office building on the planet probably has some old P4 Dells they forgot about in a closet somewhere.
I have about 30 somewhere lol.
You can't install a V5 or a V4 or a 3500, though. P3 BX is still the best but expensive choice.
Yeah, the Pentium III and Athlon platforms are sought after and not super cheap, Athlon XP hit the nostalgia of "my old gaming rig", Core 2, K8 and K10 chips are still usable for some modern tasks.
But the Pentium 4 has such a bad reputation that nobody wants them, same with the Geforce FX. But with the right expectations, they make for a great, affordable retro setup. A small Northwood and an FX 5200 Ultra are great 98/XP dual boot systems. I wouldn't go for RDRAM, that was expensive and still is, but a Northwood 1.6A and a gig of DDR-400 would make for a neat setup.
The 1.6A could easily go to 2.4 GHz if needed and the 2.4C will hit 3.2 GHz just fine. And any chip around 3 GHz will easily get to 4
For flexibility I'd say a model with a small multi and fast FSB would be best. The multi is usually not user-changable, but clocking up or down to reach other speeds is possible.
@@Loundsify Where did you get them from?
@@PunmasterSTPI work in a school doing IT support
Back to 2001 had Pentium 4 1.6 GHz with geforce 2 & was happy 😄
Amazing combination.
Well that’s a good system for the year back in 2000 I had amd athlon 850mhz 128 mb ram and GeForce 2 32mb felt like a super computer in 2000 but games evolved fast back then just the next year or 2 games were much much more demanding.
I had P4 Prescott HT, ATI Radeon 9800xt, 1GB of RAM and 19" CRT... Killer PC back then...
I have a socket 423 system with the 1.7GHz P4. Paired it with a Geforce4 Ti 4200 and Vortex2 sound card. It's an excellent DOS/98 PC. I've been using it for the vast majority of my retro games for about 5 years without any issues. I think the motherboard is the Asus P4T.
Yet another brilliant video! I am a Pentium 4 fanatic myself. I was fortunate to have the best P1, P2 and P3 CPUs and yes, I admit that Pentium 4 A and B struggled with the P3 1.4GHz. Yes, in some games and applications the Athlons could have been better. However, my Pentium 4 2.4 GHz (without HT) has never let me down. It is with me since 11 Nov 2002. I still use it 2-3 times a week for a quick retro game. With the AGPx8 Ati Radeon 4650 1GB GPU it is capable to run Civilization 5 with up to 30 fps. DOOM3, Farcry 1, Battlefield 1942 and 2, Flight Simulator X etc. All pre-2006 game run at max details. Yes, P4s are running hot. Yes, they don't have a throttle down feature. However, I love it! I enjoy your channel so much!
Awesome 😎
My first PC had a Pentium 4 but it was a later one running at 2.4 GHz. I had it paired with a GeForce 4 Ti4600 and it ran everything I played at the time great. I even played through Half-Life 2 on that system when I first got it and it worked well, although not at the highest detail. I had XP on that system and never tried 98.
Intel was in Fry's electronics demo'ing the new 1.4ghz system with Quake 3. Was so impressed I plopped down my credit card and got the motherboard/cpu/ram combo. Prior to my P4, upgrades were almost yearly. I think I managed to keep mine running up until 2006 or so, when the first Core2Duo's came out. My system at the time was pretty speedy. I had an Adaptec SCSI controller, a 15k RPM drive. I clutched onto my Glide graphics as long as I could.
Having that 15k SCSI drive would’ve helped a LOT back then.
Hi Phil, nice to see you again playing and enjoying with your retro machines, back then I only had eyes for AMD, nowadays I don't mind at all about brands I try to enjoy every machine for what it can be.
I'm sure to do AMD stuff soon :D
Had a Pentium III and that thing was amazing, upgraded to an Athlon 2800+ and seeing that against a P4 I stuck with AMD ever since, even FX for god knows how many years (Linux did help it's performance lol), finally Zen dropped, 2600 and now on a 5700x, I'll keep this for a few years as I guess games will hammer the GPU more than CPU in future if Vulkan becomes more adopted... I no longer code so the need for cores is no longer there...
I loved the Pentium 4, but I still prefer my Pentium 3. The new format is great too, Phil! Thank you!
well done, enjoyable again. thanks phil! i got a p4 641 for my upcoming win 98 build, gotta replace a couple caps on the evga 790i ultra, then find a couple evga 8800 somethings for an attempt at sli.
A P4 with Intel 845 chipset has given me almost zero problems over the years. No matter which card I've used with it
My experience with Pentium 4 was (and still is) with my Toshiba Satellite a75 S211. I got it second hand around 2011, and I still use it today to play retro games. It is hooked up to my CRT TV via the S-video out, and playing emulators on a TV just looks and feels right. I ran through some issues with the CPU overheating and shutting off the system entirely, but I discovered that was because one of the fans had just died. I replaced it with a used (and rather noisy) one, and it kickss ass beautifully! Keep up the great content!
In 2000 I was still rocking a P3 500mhz and a voodoo 3. I had a P4 2.8ghz and the FX 5600 in 2003. That rig treated me well for years until I upgraded to the Athlon x2 5600 and an 8800GT in 2007. I was super broke in those days and it literally took me years to buy upgrades. I remember complaining about 150$ graphics cards. Seems like a bad joke nowadays. Recently bought a RTX4080 for 1000$. Ugh.
in 2000 , i had a Celeron 1.8 Mhz , 256 of Sdram , a 40 Gb HDD , and i played with an integrated S3 ships on board , a PC bought by my dad (may him rest in peace) at that time , i live in north Africa , Algeria to be precise , at that time and even today , gaming PC is a luxury , to give you an idea , an RTX 4080 cost 16 month of the minimum salary , but since i got a job , i ,embarked into an upgrading road continually (i only skipped the FERMI architecture) , i have an RTX 3070 TI for now , the 4000 series is still too expensive and power hungry and not really worth the upgrade for my knowledge , peace !
Back then I used the family pc. Was lucky to have an athlon xp 2200+ and 256 mb ram on top of a geforce 2 Mx 64 mb. Man those were fun times playing medal of honour allied assault online haha
@@liveyourdreammedia the Good Old Days ! gives you a PC Veterant kind of feeling !
Yeah... 150-300$ graphics card looked extremely expensive. Now you can go and buy everything better, but if only you have $1000 and more 🤣🤣🤣
@@offlinegamer6756 love your name btw
Great video Phil! Format was great and thanks for running through those games. I picked up a brand new Asus P4B (478) and paired it with a 1.8ghz P4 running 98. I've also got P4 650HT running xp, and some spare P4 630's.
It's always fun playing with P4 machines!
Great to hear!
The first computer I built for myself out of parts was a P4. The capacitor plague took it before its 4th birthday, but I will always have some nostalgia for these hot beasts.
Excellent video Phil! I really enjoyed watching it!
Many thanks!
I remember me with my friend got to test P3 Copermine 800MHz and P4 1.3GHz - P4 was a little bit snappier when load was low, but if you wanted to do it "the modern game" (we where in to Ultima Online), so open browser, Ultima and Winamp running at the same time - and that really punished P4 big times, while P3 was just chugging like a king!
I didn't need the B-roll to enjoy your videos, but adding some here and there really spices things up! Great video as always!
Thank you :D
Thank you for the new format Phil. Artention to detail is always a BIG+. I can't believe you actually owned a P4 back in the day. I owned an AMD Athlon setup initially with a Duron 600 and eventually an Athlon 1400. That build lasted until my Intel Core second gen build- you must have been REALLY well off to go Pentium 4 at a time when it cost like 4x more and consistently lost to AMD... not that it is bad to be wealthy but P4 was really flexing financial muscle back in the day.
It was a Pentium 4 2.6 with DDR. So it was much later and competition was strong between Intel and AMD. PCs were not expensive at the time, it was very competitive with new things coming out all the time!
Nice to see your face Phil, hopefully you'll get more subs push through now as deserved
Thank you 🙂
I had a Pentium 4 back in the day. It was a 3.8 GHz Prescott model. I had to buy an aftermarket cooler because the one it came with could not keep up when playing "heavy" games (GTA San Andreas was OK, but Oblivion ran poorly). This was also the time of cold cathode lights and case modding. It served me well until I eventually got a Core 2 Duo some years later.
I had to get an aftermarket Zalman cooler for my Prescott, because it gave off so much heat. This was my last intel for years and started to run with the AMD Athlons for years, until Intel got it's game back with the Core i7.
Nice. 3.8 GHz was the highest official clock speed P4 reached - it never crossed the 4GHz barrier.
You were lucky I used Prescott till 2013 just for browsing the web & TH-cam,kept it running 24x7 I think that's to blame my mental disorder the immense heat in Arab desert.
@@S9uareHead They never released the 4.0 GHz model, but it was planned. But then, you could just as well do it yourself. Get a 3.0 or 3.2 GHz model and clock it yourself. And since oc goes over the FSB and the architecture really benefits from more bandwith, you'd end up with a faster model than what would be released.
@@frankg.2949 Intel became super competitive in 2006 with their Core 2 chips. Better IPC than Athlon 64 and the ability to clock higher. K10 could keep up, but that time Intel had already released Nehalem. I'd say around 2007-2018 was Intel's great time with unrivaled performance. Only Zen2 was able to catch up and beat them.
Hey Phil! Thank you so much for sharing with us such a great video again! Definetively this video format is awesome! Cheers from Argentina!
Back in the day I was a die hard AMD fan, but nowadays I've sort of warmed up to Intel too. I have some spare parts, so maybe it's time to put together a couple of Intel retro rigs as well.
You could totally do the benchmarking of old. See if there are things that have changed and how they scale. That would also hit the retro market quite well.
Hey guuuuuy! Thanks for the interesting video. The P4 kind of went right by me back then.
Love the video, would be great to do a side by side of this P4 1.4Ghz with the P3 1.4Gz (Tualatin) with the same Video Card and other parts and see how they compare. Personally, I run a P3 1.4Ghz with a Geforce 4 4600 and the Orpheus II. Love the setup, its so flexible, old DOS all the way through the early 2000's all on 98SE.
The P3 runs rings around it in most everything.
A 1400 Tualatin can easily keep pace with a 1.6-1.8 GHz Northwood and in some cases even a 2.0-2.4 GHz model.
The 1400 Willamette is about as fast as a 1000 Coppermine or 1200 Tualatin Celeron.
what is the model number of your CPU? SL????
I have One in my Gateway P4 2.8 and Rambus , Great Machine Thanks for the Video.
Love your work Phil!
Thank you!
Hey Phil, thanks for giving these parts some well deserved chances :)
More to come! Any requests?
@@philscomputerlab Of course, in the same spirit, maybe you can go to the AMD side, with the first Athlon XPs, or Athlon, even Duron.
@@MidnightGeek99 Yes haven't covered these in ages ..
Interesting Video. I did not know that the early P4 had such a bad reputation back then. My first gaming pc with a CPU in the GHz range was a Pentium 4, 1,5 GHz with intel 850gbc mainboard and Asus v7100 as a graphics card and I was blown away. But I was coming from P2 266 MHz system so this was not hard. I do not have the system anymore but I will go back into Windows 98 gaming again and want to make super high end system I could never afford back then.
The PIII was a much better CPU but the P4 was more powerful. They killed the P4 line and went back to the PIII which went on to become the Core2.
Pentium 4 was a marketing child. Who could say no do commercials going on about the "2.4 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor", when the closest Athlon had 1.8 GHz.
Phil you’ve given us so much! Thank you.
More to come!
P4's aged pretty well. Cheap, widely available, and super compatible for retro machines
Amd was smoking Intel in the p4 days.
Wide availability for basically free is a big plus as well. Athlon XPs were better in pretty much every way at the time, but good luck finding a working cheap one today.
..and my 1400MHz T'bird. 266MHz did not?
@@PhAyzoN You can find plenty of Athlons XP, but mostly not that higher models and also, later P4 had dual channel which makes some difference. Some decent 3 GHz P4 is perfect platform for Win 98-XP retro gaming build. Ofcourse there is nothing wrong with Athlon XP, but games back in the time were designed for HW which didn't exist yet, so when you want to play some 1999 game on ultra setting in 1280x1024, you need 3 GHz P4, all later AGP GPUs are bottlenecked even by 3GHz P4 so with some Athlon XP for socket 462, it's pointless to install better GPU than like 6600GT and even that will be bottlenecked.
i was thinking about building such a machine . my pc back them used a P2 so its soo dlow even for retro. what kind of gpu and other componebts would I need
Still have my 3.4 Northwood. Great stable system back in the day. Kept me warm at night too.
Happy Friday Phil! I love the Pentium 4 platform. I just built a P4 system as a WinXP gaming rig. It uses an nForce chipset but works grand under XP. I do have a couple Dell socket 478 builds as well that dual boot 98 and XP, and they run perfectly including dual channel DDR 400 ram. I do have one socket 423 board that uses Rambus, but it’s a little finicky so I never used it in a full build. Thanks for sharing Phil!
Many of the Dell machines had Intel OEM boards and good reliability.
I don't like nForce chipsets, I always had problems with that. For socket 478 boards, I prefer Intel 865 chipsets, it supports prescott and DDR400 and it's reliable, no problems with late AGP cards etc....
You know Phil, I was there back in the days of MS-DOS, the IBM 5150, had a 8mhz 286 with VGA as my first IBM compatible PC and had an Amiga 2000 with 3 megs of RAM (!) and a 500 megabyte SCSI HD. OC'd a Celeron 300a to 450 mghz and had a 486 66 dx with a Mediatek Pro Audio Spectrum 16 Pro. Your channel brings back memories of good times. Thank you!
What was your favourite PC or era?
@@philscomputerlab It wasn't until things kind of stalled late in the Pentium 4 era that my enthusiasm kind of waned. I had a Core 2 system and a Phenom x4 that was in use until 2020, but Windows 10 kind of commoditized things after 2015.
That's a really awesome project I'm actually thinking of going with a P4 (S478) for my retro 98 machine for some old Star Trek Games for the more authentic feel tbh! :3
My first proper PC was the AthlonXP which ran 98 and XP very very well, I have an ATI HD 3650 512MB AGP that I'm looking to use as the old Catalyst drivers I remember worked wonderfully for the games I played back in the day :)
You was very lucky if that HD3650 AGP worked without problems, these late ATI GPUs for AGP slots were very problematical. I have one HD4650 now and in some MBs it doesn't even give you image (some socket 462 MBs), I had even problem in sc754 MB, it kind of worked, but there were some problems. Only platform where it works without any issues are late sc 478 MBs, so Pentium 4 plaftorm.
Awesome work Phil! Loving this new format 👌
Glad to hear it!
I like the Pentium 4, I grew up with it.
My first was a 2Ghz Northwood which was in the family PC for what felt like forever but was probably about 4 or 5 years. It replaced a 350mhz Pentium II.
Played so many great games on it with no issues and the performance was really good compared to all my friend's PCs and consoles at the time.
I eventually did an in-socket upgrade to a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 around 2006, before building my first PC later that year based on a socket 775 3.4Ghz cedar mill Pentium 4.
Thought that was awesome until I upgraded to a Q9650 in 2009; biggest upgrade I've ever done by the way.
I now have two Windows XP gaming PCs with Pentium 4 extreme editions. One is a socket 478 3.2Ghz version, the other is a socket 775 3.4Ghz version.
I still have a 3.0 GHz Cedar Mill here, and while it can reach 4 GHz fine, it will get completely destroyed by a single core Conroe Celeron.
I have a soft spot for LGA775, the fact that a 3 GHz single core Pentium 4 (or downclocked to 2.4 GHz) can run on the same platform as a 4 GHz Core 2 Quad with about 9 times the performance is just crazy. And overclocking still takes some work. It isn't just more vcore and upping the multi. Everything is done through the FSB, so northbridge clock, memory clock, memory strap, etc are all connected.
@@HappyBeezerStudios I've still got my Cedar Mill 641 that I bought back in 2006. Great CPU, I overclocked it to 5Ghz once, don't think it was stable but it was still mind blowing back then. I have found that the Pentium 4 Gallatin extreme edition is slightly faster in games though so that's why I run it in my retro rig.
I learnt on the 775 platform and like you have a soft spot for it. The first 3 PCs that I built were all 775 so it still feels natural to me to do FSB overclocking. I didn't upgrade to anything else until 2014 when I got a 4690k.
Does that FX5500 have some bulging caps - those closest to output ports? It is not clear on the video.
Yes it does!
@@philscomputerlab so that's probably the reason why its malfunctioning. This is actually quite common for FX series to have bad caps.
Pentium 4 Northwood models aged better than Prescott cores as they were built on a more efficient node and by the time it was released, dual channel DDR motherboards and chipsets were abundant thus giving people a cheaper option to RDRAM (SDRAM was holding back early Pentium 4 chips). During this time I was on the Socket A platform with the AMD Duron 1.3 GHz (Morgan core) and soon after upgraded to the Athlon XP 1800+ on an nForce 1 platform (which a year later would become an Athlon XP 2500+ OC'd to 3200+ levels on an nForce 2 Ultra platform).
Prescotts longer pipeline with goals for 7 GHz never lived up to it's tasks.
Love the format of the video, Glad to put a face to the voice. You film very well. Looking forward to more videos.
Yay! Thank you!
Still running a P4-2.8HT with 1GB ram and a SSD caddy so I can (drive swap) run DOS, win98, winXP and even Vista on it. It has 2x voodoo2 cards, ATI 9800, SBlive!.. Works great for all my retro gaming needs from mid 90's to mid 2000's.
Cheers!
That is a sweet setup.
I found a pentium 4 at a flea market for 10 dollars. and thank you Phil for your awesome web page and your guidance.. playing old games from my childhood has been a blast..
I wanted an Athlon XP for my Windows 98 machine but I'm having no luck with the motherboards. Since I have several P4 machines I went with a P4 2.66Ghz on an Asus P4S8X-X, GeForce FX 5600 128MB and Sound Blaster Live SB0060, so my current setup is very similar to the one you tested, except for DDR instead of RDRAM, 2 real IDEs with 80GB and 320GB, and dual booting Win98 and Win2000 on the same partition 🙂
I've bought a lot of sc 462 motherboards in last few months for few bucks here in Czech Republic, not always in great condition, but it always worked. I can't imagine living in country where you have only eBay with their crazy prices, those worldwide sellers are totaly crazy. Sometimes it's enough to just visit some local computer store and ask if they have some "old trash" and very often they have and they are happy that you will take it for free. 🙂
Makes me wonder why Windows 2000. Might be just for period correctness, but there isn't anything that 2000 does that XP can't do either, but with support for some newer software. Yes, it means going to "classic" layout, but should do fine. On my 933 MHz Pentium 3 build I'M running 98 SE and XP on 256 MB RAM and XP is just fine. In fact, with my CRT it feels snappier than my modern machine with modern parts.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Wrong, I thought that XP is just reskined 2000 for a long time, but even when core is almost the same, there is massive difference in compatibility with old games and software. Win 2000 has advantages of NT, it knows NTFS file system, it's stable, it knows USB 2.0 AND compatibility with Win 9x games is much better than in XP for some reason. Try for example AvP1 or NFS 5, both games are bugged in XP, but work totaly fine in 2000. Ofcourse you can use Win 98 or ME, but 2000 has drivers for HW to like 2005, so you can build superior computer for these late Win 9x games. Test it, I am not kidding, compatibility in Win 2000 with old games is much better and it's better to play DOS games in DOS box now, so I don't really need actual Win 9x based OS.
@@HappyBeezerStudios The explanation is very simple. I have 3 retro machines, the older one runs Win3+1+Win95+NT4 (3Dfx games), the 2nd one runs Win98SE+Win2K, the 3rd one runs WinXP+Win7 (DX9 and above). Basically for nostalgia since I've used all these OSes extensively over the years, also because dual/triple booting requires less physical machines 🙂
I was an early adopter, with a 1.5GHz Willamette P4 on socket 423. It was not great and there were many regrets. Especially since socket 423 was a dead end.
Interesting video! Although the P4 Willamette wasn't a great CPU, it still is very nice for a Windows 98 retro system.
Indeed
Willamette was sort of a proof of concept. Completely inferior to Tualatin, but functional.
Northwood was the height of the architecture. Massive increases in clocks (and thus performance) and unbeatable (at the time) in some tasks.
Prescott lenghened the pipeline, reduced IPC but couldn't balance that out with even higher clocks. It was pretty much unable to do what it was designed for.
Cedar Mill was pretty much just a shrink of Prescott, but fixed the power draw and is a decent ship. Pretty much what Prescott should've been from the start.
Great video, I was also on the pentium platform, My coworker was amd and we always went back and forth.. good times.. cheers.
Its insane. I used this EXACT same setup until 2013 (was the family computer). I overclocked the P4 to 1.6ghz (i had no idea what i was doing) and somehow burnt out my fx 5200 at some point trying to swap it into something else. It was a horrible machine but it gave me my love for older computers and introduced me to loads of older games (such as system shock 2!). Still have the computer today. Super cool video.
I like this style.
Keep it up Phil!
The P4 is a perfect example of when Intel allowed their marketing department to fully drive the engineering. The goal was sky high clock speeds at all costs, hence the super deep pipeline and other design decisions. It's a CPU line that it easily overlooked these days in large part because the chips that came before and after it from both AMD and Intel were so much better in many ways.
For me the P4 generation is when I went over to AMD for a while. I had been with Intel through the Slot 1 and Socket 370 gens after spending the entire Socket 7 generation with AMD chips. Then in 2001 I attended a pop-up AMD Roadshow event in Chicago IL at the launch of the Athlon XP line and won a MSI motherboard and Athlon XP 1800+ CPU which at the time was their fastest chip. So I stuck with AMD through the Athlon XP days. Later on I had a Barton core Athlon XP 2500+ CPU that I had overclocked to 3200+ speeds which served me well until the time when the later Core 2 and AM2 based Athlons were common.
I did end up using a lot of P4 based machines at work though (I was an IT contractor for the US Army then) and quite a few of them were dog slow, especially when they got hot and thermal throttled. A P4 was fairly well behaved in a stable temperature environment, but put one in a warehouse or factory setting and boy were they a pain! I was so glad when the Core 2 based machines came in to replace them.
P4 with mechanical HDD, low RAM and Vista. Tech support worst nightmare
At that time Intel didn't know P4 wouldn't scale that well in terms of frequency and that it would encounter major headwind in the form of TDP. AMD was worse. It knew about the problems of P4 but still decided to release Bulldozer.
@@Alex-df4lt NetBurst, Bulldozer, POWER6, all designs aimed to go to super high clocks, replaced by lower clocking, high IPC designs, that managed to reach the same actual clocks.
Yes, in 2007, just when Intel went away from their GHz race, IBM decided to release 5 GHz CPUs. And not only that, POWER6 was in-order.
I have only Abit IS7-E2 on socket 478. I never have motherboard on socket 423, maybe in future.
My first computer had Pentium 4 that was almost 20 years ago. It was the era of Windows XP. Back then 512mb can make your computer so fast.
Fun fact: I still have the original computer case.
That Geforce FX5500: Looks like the capacitor top left is swollen. Might be a bad angle, but normally that caused the glitching and instability. This bring back so many memories! We had a 1.7 Pentium 4 on Intel Desktop Board. Once I replaced all the caps on a glitching motherboard with onboard graphics. It actually worked, and the PC was usable again.
ah yes, back when a PIII at 1.3 ghz was better than a P4 at 1.4 ghz, intel never stops
Back when a PIII at 1.4 GHz was faster than a P4 at 1.8 GHz
Later p4 were pretty good, nice rivalty with AMD in those years. The HT models took the edge back from AMD in some applications if I remember well
Hi, Phil. Thanks for the great Video.
I saved an Win98-machine until this day and now it itches to go through all the installation to try some old stuff and show it to my nephew.
To the graphic-problems of your first card: It may be the light, but some of the capacitors seems to bulge.
Could be just voltage instability, that a swap would fix.
Greetings, Carsten.
It's a great hobby!
i could make you ISO's i have 95 98SE and me along with win2k
@@CotyRiddle thanks, very much. I have got all that i need at Hand because i saved software and licenses. As Always time ist the problem. 😉
I still have intel pentium 4 2.0 ghz with intel extreme graphic ( spoiler alert, performance not so extreme) in my old pc
4:18 didn't you apply thermal paste?
Nope I'm using thermal pads.
your FX 5500 seems to have 3 swollen capacitors on it, replace them and it will probably work fine again, hell replace all 6, even the other 3 that look fine probably no longer have their original capacity
4:51 Maybe try recapping the gpu to fix screen weirdness. Some of them look like they're bulging.
I had one of these and used it until 2008... Boy did it suck in 2008, by then it was barely usable.
I was using a Pentium 4 670 model until spring 2012 as my daily driver. It only struggled with video over 720p but other than that it still performed fine. Obviously gaming would be another story.
@@EgoShredder That's a significantly faster and newer one, not surprising it lasted until 2012.
Coming from a family of Mac users, our very first windows machine was a Dell with a 3.2 ghz P4 and Radeon 9800 running XP. It was a heck of a machine and I have great memories of endless hours in Simcity 4 and the Sims. It got me started on digital music too, syncing up my iPod at the time. It never occurred to me to try Win98 on it - I wish I still had the machine, though I retain the Radeon.
Stellar P4 build!
The Athlon was kind of the enthusiast's choice, put the p4 always just worked. I liked the stability and the compatibility, less drivers issues on intel.
That's exactly what I am saying for almost 20 years, I never liked that AMD fanatic army. Yes, Athlon XP was more energy efficient, but it was not THAT good as they were saying and CPU alone is not everything, you neeed to look even at motherboards and sc 462 motherboards were so outdated, you still had to set FSB manualy, so some people had just basic CPU frequency because they didn't know what to do with that, it still didn't have dual channel and compatibility with late AGP cards was pretty bad.
Some later sc 462 MBs didn't even have USB keyboard option in bios and I remember USB keyboards were already pretty common in like 2003, Intel MBs supported this already on most of socket 370 boards. Ofcourse USB keyboard worked in bios and on post screen, but it didn't work on "press any key to continue" screen while installing Windows. 🙂
But if you like sado-maso, then sc462 is a perfect platform for you.
Some late decent sc 478 MB is the best platform for superiour Win 9x retro gaming computer.
Really good to see you in front of the camera, i feel it really makes a channel more personal so it's a good move. I also like the bigger focus on the games, Screamer 4x4 was one i played to death in the early 2000's and it's got to my one of my favourite retro games.
It's really nice to see this reviews of old, bad, failed hardware. Not only good parts reviews are interesting to watch ❤
I was putting a new machine together from scratch in early 2002, and the Pentium 4 1.7GHz was the current one at the time if I remember correctly, but I chose to go with a Celeron 1200 Tualatin CPU, due to people saying the Pentium was still being out performed by the Pentium III. The gap between the PIII and Celeron model was not massive at the time, so I saved some money instead.
Great video. Great throwback. Thank you.
Oh things go wrong. Things always go wrong. Lmao. I say this as I fight with a board i am suspecting is flakey.
it was nice how old boards without VRM heatsinks stood their ground.
They could indeed, but even back then with the 115W chips it was tight.
P4 3.2 clocked to 4.0, 7950 GT, 4 gigs of Corsair Ram, Asus board, don't remember the chipset right now, and a couple of highspeed drives in raid... Good times. Still have a few old P4 machines laying around. Creative sound card with Z5500 speakers... liked my old P4 computers. I have an old 3.4 extreme edition, that would only run 3.6, and a 7800GS Golden Sample with the unauthorized 7950's chipset. This video makes me want to play around with that old hardware.
I worked on many P4 machines in college. We had the Dell OptiPlex GX260/270/280 machines. On occasion we'd have some bad caps or even bad CPU's. Not all of the machines had the same warranty -- Gold support would give us whatever we said we needed. Regular support made us test everything with them on the phone even if we already knew what was wrong.
Excellent vid as always, Phil! Been watching your vids for years and YEARS, and I'm SOOOO HAPPY that you FINALLY started showing your face! I really hated it all those years NOT KNOWING what you looked like! You OFTEN talk about how sought after high end PIIIs are, and I have the ultra-rare socket 7 1 GHz (?), which I haven't used for years and years. I tried to find one of those for YEARS, and when I FINALLY got one, I was OVER THE MOON! Now it just sits and does nothing. Maybe someday it'll be worth a million dollars and I can sell it and retire a rich woman??? I also have a BUNCH of P4s, which I used to use the heck out of, but haven't been touched for prob a decade at least. I also used to have TONS of old vid cards (like the 5200), but they had to go when space became a prob. Unfortunately, they were all RECYCLED, and not SOLD to people who would covet them. Sigh. Anyway, LOVE your vids even tho I don't do retro PC stuff anymore! Brings back soooo many MEMORIES for me! Cheers, mate!
😀Thanks for the comment, really appreciate it!
I have this board and ram (ATX version) for sale somewhere (not trying to advertise so not saying where).. lol.. My test bench card is a 5700LE, super cool to have you testing on hardware that I have and have tested myself. Your videos motivated me to get out my old hardware from storage and muck around with it again. Good video.
It really is a fun hibby😊
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEES TA! I played that for YEARS over a 56k modem with friends! I was even in a clan! I actually bought the CD recently to play on my 233 MMX (which is what I played it on at the time - may have been a 200, that was 25 years ago).
The game is pretty sweet. I recall you needed a lot of RAM for the larger maps.
Oh boy, I think it will struggle on the 233 MMX, at least that's what I found when testing on a Celeron 266. Even a Pentium II was struggling a little when there are many units on the screen and you play at a high resolution with a large view. TA is amazing! I find it hard to play other games, it is so well done, slick and smooth.
@@philscomputerlab I recall it was a show stopping game - Won some awards in 1997 as well. I had 128 Mb of RAM in my system, and for sure I had a Voodoo (not sure if 3DFX game) so that helped. There was times when it lagged despite that. IIRC the min. requirements were P120 or 133, so I felt pretty safe at 233 ;) My friend played it on his 266, there wasn't much difference in game play. Hundreds of hours spent over the years - we played it on MPlayer into the 2000s.
Playing over a 56k connection, some games specifically banned flash tanks because they would lag out the game and keep shooting well after they were "destroyed". I also remember kidnapping the commander with an Atlas, and avoiding FLAK and rocket launchers by repeatedly clicking all my planes so they stack up, then using the minimap to send them into the enemy's camp "off map", only to change the target 2-3 seconds later. It was hard to do but extremely effective when done right.
That and making the Big Bertha shoot twice its range by aiming directly in front of it ;)
Oh and the expandability - so many 3rd party packs... Such a great game.
Now I want to play more! BTW it will feature again soon because I enjoyed playing it so much.
That 5500 looked like it had bad caps. Locations C170 and C190 respectively.
The Wayback Machine actually does have this board's download page archived. The chipset driver you used is way newer than the one it lists (3.20.1008), and the BIOS version you have is already the latest (P05).
Thanks for the tip, I just downloaded them onto NAS and going up to the website as well :)
15:13 ..sounds like Socket 939 to me 😛
Best of lotsa' "worlds" an' 2 cores too 😲
Great video as all your others! Bit late on watching this video, sorry! 😋 I really loved my P4 machine, first platform I bought myself with money from work. I don't remember which P4 I had, but it was the 478 socket for sure. I think it was at that time I had an Geforce 2 Ti/VX from Inno3D. I think I used this setup in Windows XP also, but that time was around senior high school, so there were lots of other things to think about, so I don't remember completely.
Anyhow, so fun to see you feature Total Annihilation - it was one of my favourite games back then. Had a cracked version at that time, but I've actually purchased a real copy on CD with the expansions late last year.
Love the video! Can't wait for next one ❤
Awesome 😎
Totally agree, it wasn't until many, many years later that I heard that NetBurst was flawed in some way. Mine (Pentium 4 630 @ 3.0GHz) certainly never gave me any grief at the time.
Hi Phil. Is there a tool to trim a ssd under win98 or winXP?
I did a video about this recently and contacted a few SSD manufacturers. They assured me it is not an issue with modern SSDs. So now I just use them and don't worry about it.
Hey Phil - awesome video. Long live the P4! My family computer from back in 2003 was a P4 and it served us well. Lots of fond memories playing counterstrike and talking to friends on MSN messenger.
I built my win98 rig using a P4 after watching some of your other videos, and used a similar intel board to this (Intel D865GBF). I got it NOS so it came with the driver disc (and no bad caps!). I'm kind of new to this, but I was wondering if it would be helpful for me to upload an iso of this disc for others, and if so where I should upload it to?
Archive.org is a great place to upload such things! I also upload stuff to my website :)
@@philscomputerlab Nice one - just checked it out and looks like a few people have already beaten me to it :-)
Wow, that RDRAM was and is REALLY expensive. Like the new format dude, good suff as always. I too loved my hot ass P4.
I have lots of LGA 478 P4 processors but sadly too few working boards thanks to bad caps.
Found one of these in a Dell at a thrift store for $20 recently, while wanting a cheap Win98. for retro gaming…it’s been a pleasure for the price!
Good video. Maybe do a follow up video and use this pc as a Windows XP gaming machine.
Still own a P4 651 (LGA 775) based Widows XP system that was the family PC from 2007 to 2012, older platforms tend to stick around a bit longer in Latin America. I still use it once in a blue moon, to go over some of the media I downloaded back in my teens, during the wild west phase of the internet.
I have a similar config, built 5 or 6 yrs ago, with 2.2GHz P4 and Radeon 9600xt on a red MSI board with the same amount of RDRAM. Put WinXP on it, but it seems it's much more fun with win98. Will try it in the next few days.
My next config is a dual core pentium with radeon x1600. It is only a few yrs older chronologically than the P4, but the performance gap is huge. Amazing increase in clock speed and overall those days.
Great video as always!
Install both of it. It's just right at the spot where XP is popular, but some people were still sticking with 98 SE
Nice changes, I like the format
Thanks, I really enjoy playing the games actually. A lot ice only ever run as a benchmark.
Ever honest Phil... 10:58 "There's lots of dialogue going on with cheesy lines...and umm, yeah!"... Love it!
Great to start the weekend with new Win98 video from Phil :) BTW. which DirextX and NVidia drivers version you have used? I have never managed to get Screamer 4x4 working properly on my Win98 P4/FX5600 build with DX9 and NV78 driver set. It was constatly having some Z-buffer issue having objects overlapping with each other :(
So DirectX was version 9, the one that comes with the linked Audigy drivers for the Live! GeForce driver version I'm sure is shown or mentioned, version 56. something 🙂
The game supports OoenGL, Direct 3D and Glide. I used OpenGL it works faster on NVIDIA cards slower in Radeon. Check the game folder you will find different executables ...
@@philscomputerlab Perfect, definitely will try then with 56 driver set. Many Thanks Phil for your support and inspiration as always :)
At the time I did almost went to the Pentium 4 route. And in fact I did get the P4 motherboard, but with Asus CT-479 adapter and with a Pentium M socket 479 mobile chip. It was mostly faster than any of the Pentium 4 chips. I first had it with Pentium M 755 and later upgraded it to the Pentium M 780. The graphics card what I used came from Gainward 7800GS+ Golden sample 512MB. It was actually a 7900GT but in AGP! I still have that computer and use it when I feel like playing some retro games.
The Pentium M were amazing.
First real CPu was a P4 3.0 with Hyperthreading, I lapped it, got a beefy cooler, and clocked the hell out of it; think I hit 4.2 tops, but I remeber when I finally completed an OCCT run at 4GHZ I genuinely jumped around the room with joy, was a genuinely good CPU that brought one of my more memorable experiences building computers as a teen.
Overclocking P4 3GHz did a pretty high difference in FPS, late AGP GPUs were bottlenecked by P4 and games in like 2006-2008 were already designed for C2D. Even 2004 FarCry needs C2D to run with stable 60+ FPS, it's impossible to get with P4 in 1280x1024 with high details.
@@Pidalin Hah, I know; FC was one of my main benchmarks at the time; along with a pencil modded X800 All-in-wonder running XT bios I got Farcry running at a rate I was happy with at the time, but 60 fps was something I wouldn't be in search of for a long time.
@@K3NnY_G I still don't understand for what HW they designed those games. Look at for example our Czech Mafia game from 2002, even with P4 3GHz and HD4650, it's dropping to 30 FPS in city, how could people play that in 2002? I actually remember how, but it's still crazy how we played it back in the day, like 640x480, super low details and having 25 FPS. 😀
I found duron 1.3GHz with a 6200 turbo cache in a skip, i tried an athlon 2100+ and it worked and then a 2700+ which worked as well, along with a 9800 Pro card. Runs 98 SE perfectly. It's damn fast, stupid overkilll. Has an ISA slot too, i put an awe64 value in and works in native dos.
Great Phil, whats the story with triple buffering, what are the performance impacts?
No performance impact!
Triple buffering basically uses, as the name suggests, three instead of two framebuffers. So if you can't keep your vsync target, you won't drop to half the framerate.
in 2001 i had friend who had a brand new P4 1,5GHz with Windows ME.
I never saw someone so disappointed by a desktop ever again.