Retro Time-warp Pentium - What can it do today?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ย. 2023
- This desktop Pentium system looks as good as the day it was put together, which maybe isn't surprising, given that it was built only a week prior to this video being made. Most of the parts are new-old-stock finds from dusty tech stock cupboards.
System Specifications:
CPU: Intel Pentium4 3ghz from 2004 with Hyperthreading
Motherboard: Something from that period. 1xPCIe-16 and 2xPCI
Ram: 2x1GB, the maximum the system will take
Case: Low Profile from 1999, sealed in shipping box until now
Monitor: Unbranded SVGA Multisync from 1999
Hard Disk: 10,000 RPM Sata
GPU: Nvidia GT 730
Mouse: Microsoft Basic Optical V1.0
Keyboard: Unbranded, but fairly new
Speakers: Some 1990's powered type
This video shows the system build, talks a little about Pentiums generally, then runs some test software and games in both Windows 10 and Linux Mint.
There is a short segment from the Computer Chronicles TV production in 1993, introducing Pentium chips. This segment is reproduced for educational purposes and is copyright to the Computer Chronicles.
Enjoyed this thoroughly. Brings back thick nostalgia. Your gentleman accent adds to the enjoyment. Cheers.
Thank you so much, that's high praise. I've got a ton of videos I would like to do about old PC hardware, I have some quite interesting stuff hidden away in dusty crates. Getting nice comments shows they people are interested in the content which is what makes me want to put the effort in, if nobody was interested I'd not bother.
Glad my voice is understandable. I worry that people might find it a bit gravelly, I'm aware that I don't have the clearest voice. But I'm pleased that it comes across OK. Thanks for watching and commenting.
I had those exact speakers. Brings back some good memories
They don't seem to be branded or anything, but they are remarkably good for a fairly cheapy set of computer speakers, quite thumpy bass and good highs. The inbuilt amp is quite powerful and I like the pass-though power so you don't need an extra socket. These ones came cheap off eBay, I might look to pick up an extra pair at some point. Thanks for watching and commenting, take care :)
Best of luck with the relatively new channel. It's great to see old tech doing stuff. It was great to be around during the time of massive technological advancement that this era represents.
Thanks so much StingyGeek. I agree, having lived in six different decades now and been using computers daily in the last five of them, it's my feeling that the 90's (and maybe early 00's) saw by far the biggest period of practical advancement. A computer like this one, you could put a young person infront of and they'd instantly be able to use it, and it's 20+ years old. Thats not the case if you go 20+ years further, when you'd be looking at a PCXT and DOS. A very different beast and you'd be starting from scratch to learn how to use.
An enjoyable video! 👍👍 I used Pentium 4 computers for over a decade and they did the job.
Excellent video! Earned a sub for sure
Thanks so much, really appreciate you stopping by and subbing. It's a big encouragement to make more content :)
This video is lovely! It's always nice to see tech enthusiasts who not only preserve old hardware but use it as well, rather than complain about it having little use application today. The whole setup is gorgeous.
Thanks so much JawCrush, yes my house is a bit of a retirement home for old tech but you clearly think like I do, it's much better to see things be useful than cast aside as outdated. Computers like these were running the world only 20 years ago, the cause of their obsolescence today is more commercially rooted than technological. Thanks for watching and I'm glad that you like the video. I've loads more on the boil as and when I get a chance :)
very good.
oof, I actually recognise that front panel fan baffle. Back in the day, airflow was a geniunely luxury feature, that in this case comes at the expense of a disc drive
Yes, although back then things didn't get so hot but modern gpus and cpus would certainly suffer in a micro desktop case like this one. I have a few different fan intakes for 5.25 slots, very handy if airflow is a problem. Thanks for watching and commenting 🙂
nice video
2:10 Ok, this was right around the time all this weird stuff involving pipelining and parallelism started taking off for CPUs. Well maybe a little before this. But what is REALLY interesting is WHY they did this. It's not because they couldn't do it before or didn't think of it. Earlier processors COULD have been more complicated than they were (generally the constraint wasn't lack of room on the die). The reason is because all of this took off was because the processors started getting much faster than the memory (due to the different technology used on memory ICs). And this gap widened and widened. So you have the CPU sitting there wasting cycles waiting on the memory. So the designed ways to do "useful" operations while waiting for memory (cache's also grew in size). If history turned out different and we had memory as fast as CPUs, we'd still all be running processors that could be reasonably understood by one person (like say back in the days of 68k). But that wouldn't allow any room for people to hide nasty things in there 😉
I fucking love my Dimension 2400. Even in it's 20's, it's still being useful for random stuff like parallel port shenanigans and as an ftp server!
I have a Dimension 2400 in the warehouse somewhere, don't think it's been powered up for at least 15 years! Nice machines actually, and certainly still useful for lots of things. You could set it up as a pi-hole for instance. Thanks for watching :)
@@B00MERTEC Or act as a key presser to brute force the password on an old slider phone lol.
I think it can run windows xp with old good graphic games such as knight rider 2, Harry Potter 3, IGI, COD1.. I never used p4, in 2007 I got used p3 600Mhz with 128 ram 8mb vga. Then 2008 I got new pentium D beast it has 2x p4 cores glued together 😂. So hot and few mobos melted. It run well crysis with nvidia 9500gt.. Good memories 😢
Hiya Nextgen_Tech, yes you're right, this machine is straight-on XP material and actually I did try it with the X64 version of XP, as expected it ran very well. The only issue with XP these days is the lack of a modern compliant web browser, without that support it's not much use on the Internet. Linux however will run most of the modern browsers so that works well. I think Windows 7 64 bit would probably run fairly well too.
Switching to an SSD would speed it up quite a bit especially with the swap-file paging, but I liked the idea of it being a mechanical drive just because it's more appropriate for the machine. The motherboard does have sata (3gbs I think).
My dad's office computers still ran 2nd Gen Pentium(G2030) until recently. He upgraded to a 13400 whilst the staff(me and 1 other) got 4790s😂
Still good for office use
Ha! Well I guess we all know who's in charge 😄Those G2030's are really i-core processors just re-using the old Pentium brand name, as they are Ivy-Bridge architecture. They were sold as basically a sub i3 chip. They were still using the Pentium brand-name until fairly recently I think.
4790s aren't anything to turn your nose up at, even today. 4c8t is still what everything is coded for, and those particular cores and threads were so ahead of their time that they perform like a chip a quarter of their age, especially since they're an i7 with all features and high clocks. doesn't hurt that the generations after them had such slow progress, slowing their aging. They still make very solid gaming systems with a 10 or 16 series nvidia, or 500-5000 amd gpu.
@@curvingfyre6810 my main pc is a 10105, which is also a 4c8t. Pretty much the only diff imo is apart from the hardware being newer(and things like ReBar) otherwise Quad cores are still relevant
@@ivanlimzg oh for sure. hyper threading is pretty important though, i5s from that gen are pretty much the ground floor nowadays. Course, they'll all be relegated to steam OS soon anyway.
Thats quite a lovely setup, the gt 730 definately helps it run those modern games, most people would be suprised what you could run on that thing, i'd love to go through my steam backlog and see what works.
Yes the GT730 is only a tiny little card, and over a decade old but it's surprisingly punchy and will run a lot of modern stuff, at least at modest resolutions. Perhaps not at dual 8k 144fps but I'm not really in that financial league anyway. The machine itself I think would run quite a lot of games as it's still x64 but the 2gb memory is a big limitation these days, Windows 10 is very memory heavy and needs 4gb as a practical minimum. Not really sure why it needs so much memory, it doesn't seem to do much more than XP did and that needed 64mb. This machine won't take more than 2gb because it's a tiny motherboard to fit in the tiny case and back then 1gb per DIMM was normal. 2 slots means 2gb max, but in the days of XP that was plenty for a desktop. I have another P4 board of similar age that will hold a lot more (either 4gb or 8gb, can't remember). I might try and put together a system with it and give a test. Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@B00MERTEC The P4 with 8 gb sounds very interesting! Setup a capture card and game stream on the P4, Even if its just a couple viewers it could be a cozy little hangout. And by the way, I loved the fact that you threw in the Linux OS, best part of the video. With Windows 10 being memory hungry, a custom linux setup could be the answer to get the most out of the machine. If you knew how to build a system with Arch distro, you could end up with a systemthat runs a couple hundred MB RAM on boot idle, leaving something like 1.5GB for Steam and games, thats a thought :)
I had a GT 530 in 2012 for my 2007 HD 2400 Pro build and it felt like high end to me. Thats because it delivers performance like a 9600 GT or other midrange cards of that era. If you compare a 2010s low end to any early 2000s it exceeds any scale.
@@B00MERTEC Its Kepler based I think thats not even so old.
And I used to have 512 MB PCs. Having 1-2 GB was already very good at those times. I have lived with 2 GB of RAM until 2012...
Yep, 2gb was plenty. Windows XP was the latest Windows at the time and that needed 64mb. It's Windows 10 that's the issue here, it's extremely memory hungry but to be honest I'm not quite sure why it needs so much compared to XP, as apart from a more modern interface design, it doesn't seem to do a huge amount more. Maybe just much more bloaty code and pointless junk (hi Cortina).
Thanks for stopping by and contributing :)
I wanted to know those speakrs, I used to have those
Yeah they are actually really good speakers. There is no brand name on them but they are quite powerful and sound really good. The built-in amplifier is great.
nice pc nice video :)
Thanks for watching, I really appreciate you stopping by and leaving a nice comment :)
You'd be surprised what that era of processors can still do. I have a system running an Athlon64, Nvidia 6600GT, and 4gb of DDR2 and while running Windows XP I'm still able to browse the web and play what few games from the 2010s I could coax into installing on it. As for Minecraft, ClassiCube would likely run FAR better on these systems. Action Retro has a great video playing it online on a bunch of millennium-era Macs
I'd never heard of ClassiCube before, thanks so much for mentioning it! I've had a look, I'll bet it does run very well on this era of system. I did install Minetest which is similar I think, and that ran much better than regular Minecraft, but I opted not to include the footage of that as I'm trying to keep the videos as short as reasonably possible.
Yes in retrospect, XP is actually a really good operating system. I never liked it that much when it was current, I stuck with 2000 Pro well into the Vista era and kinda jumped over XP to a large extent. I've been using it a bit more recently, specifically the 64 bit version, and it seems so optimised and fast. It's a shame its not much supported anymore.
Thanks for watching and commenting :)
gotta be one of the weirdest aspect ratios i've ever seen on youtube
Yes it's 1:1 square. I don't think I've ever seen any others like that either. I like it though :)
It's a great Win XP retro build cpu :)
I did actually put the rare 64 bit version of XP on it, yes it ran like a dream as it would because it's quite a well optimised operating system compared to Microsoft's later ones which seem to be very memory-heavy for no immediately obvious reason. I'd happily stick with XP too but I've been unable to find a modern web browser that still supported on it. Seems a shame but I guess 64-bit XP users are a very small minority these days (and 32-bit XP maybe even less). But you are right though, this machine is perfect for XP. Thanks for watching and commenting, I really appreciate it :)
@@B00MERTECPersonally, I've gotten a bit "sick" of XP. Used it too much over the years.
I remember the bigass sticker on my family pc case yelling PENTIUM 4! Running W95 all the way to XP on the P4
@@B00MERTEC Actually, it seems to be the other way around. a lot more attention gets given to the 32 bit version of XP by the fan community, like getting point-of-sale updates onto consumer distributions, or the completely community-made Service Pack 4. Both are only usable on 32 bit versions, and had XP web-safe up until, I kid you not, 2019. Still half expecting someone to release another service pack cause there's still so many committed (and technically inclined) users.
@@B00MERTEC Windows XP was simply the best. I would have no problems sticking with it either. But... there is a modern and secure alternative! What I found is that Linux Mint XFCE reminds me exactly of Windows XP. It's simple, lightweight, with the added bonus of it being actively patched, and it has no spyware. And if you wanna play Windows XP games on it, you can play most XP games very well with Lutris. But, of course, I'd still love to have a physical XP machine nearby just for the feeling and nostalgia, haha.
Can't even say Roblox correctly hahahaha
bring back horizonal cases
Well in the 80's and most of the 90's, horizontal cases (or "Desktop" cases as they were called) were the norm, and tower cases were the exception. I think the desktop case was very popular when CRT's were the main type of display, because a CRT had quite a big footprint and the desktop case would just fit neatly under it. Also it raised the screen to a more comfortable line, rather than looking down at the screen sat directly on the desk. Those benefits are mostly lost with a modern LCD panel, which is probably why they are unusual to see today on modern machines. I do like a desktop case though, it would be nice if they were at least available. Some home-theatre PC cases are horizontal as they are intended to form a module on a hi-fi seperates stack, and rack-mount server cases are horizontal of course. But that's about it these days, which is a pity. Buying an old one is always an option, like I did with this one. It was made late 1990's but was new-old-stock, never opened in the box, and like new as this video shows. They are still out there...
4:24 These footage are all fakes, looks like captured from a modern pc.
Hello and thanks for commenting. All the footage did come from this computer, I promise! I think what might be throwing you off is the way I capture and display the footage. I don't really go in for the "record the screen on your camera phone" approach as I don't like the poor synchronisation between frame rates and refresh rates, it just looks flickery and blurry. So, the VGA output from this machine goes to another PC which records the stream as a MP4 file at a high bitrate. This is then overlaid back on to the recorded camera footage of the screen, within the screen borders. This way, everything is perfectly synchronised and it looks clear and sharp. So, it is true to say that you're not looking at CRT-rendered footage. But, this video is about the Pentium 4, the choice of screen is pretty irrelevant. TFT's were getting pretty popular anyway at the time of this machine, the monitor here is actually a bit old for this system. I also think this method is more true to life, the actual CRT to the human eye looks a lot more like this than the flickery scanning of a camera trying to capture footage what is basically a strobe light.
It's also about place holding. The captured footage is all 4:3 aspect ratio but my videos are all square format 1:1, and if they were not they'd be 16:9. If you want to show 4:3 content on a non-4:3 video you will have to have gaps somewhere, and I think showing the frame of an old monitor around the recorded stream just sets the composition up much more nicely than just black bars would.
This is the thought process behind the capturing method that I've chosen for this video. The personal preference of the content creator :)
About 40% of the video (at start) effectively wasted on background/history that is likely known to viewers. The rest of it barely addresses the more interesting question of the P4's utility today. Poor job overall - watching this was a waste of time.
Sorry to have wasted your time mate. I hope you find other videos that are closer to what you're looking for!