Intel Pentium 3 in 2019 Running Modern Windows and Linux - Prepare for Lag 

Some old HD images of this rig are up on the archives site if anyone is interested: www.aacatarchives.com/archives/computers/IBM/Desktops/IBM%20Eserver%20Xseries%20220/IBM%20Eserver%20Xseries%20220.html

this computer looks beautiful

"Standard VGA Adapter" -- you haven't installed GPU drivers.. :/

The machine would be A LOT less sluggish if it had some kind of video acceleration so the CPU wouldn't have to be pegged all the time rendering the desktop.

Laughed out loud with that tutorial throwback!

Try Windows 8 Consumer Preview on it since it's the last beta Windows 8 build to run on non-NX and non-SSE2 cpus. 😉

Pentium 3 era was just a cool time to look back at.

The only real potential it has is as a Retro Rig running an outdated OS like XP or 98.

0:26 that background/studio shot looks beautiful man!! You've come a long way since I first subscribed to you :D

If you can put a basic GPU, since according to what I saw is that neither the CPU nor RAM are the bottleneck in that system, to see how it would go with a GPU

Try one of these OS’s: Caldera OpenLinux Server 3.1, Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, Novell NetWare 4.2, Novell NetWare 5.1, Red Hat Linux 7.1, SuSE Linux 7.2, TurboLinux 6.5, UnixWare

Does that make it a pentium 6?

Nice work...!!

i have a old PC with these specs: -pentium ll 266mhz -264 MB of RAM -ATI radeon 7000 64mb -6 GB HDD os:antix linux 17 the system is usable i didn't connect it to internet for the moment...but he can launch firefox :D i am very impressed but this PC doesn't have a sound card = no music

Load a more lightweight Linux distribution like Linux Mint XFCE and you will be fine. I run this distribution on an IBM NetVista from 2005 with 1GB ram and the PC works fine for everyday tasks.

That is a really awesome case. I would love to build a sleeper PC in that case.

*Hello today i am for show how to downlod 10gb ram*

I think the main issue with the GTX 1060 is the fact that the CPU does not support SSE2 or any modernish instructions. The 1060 with a PCI to PCIe adapter may work on a Pentium 4 machine, though I am not sure. Also, where does one find the PCI to PCIe adapter?

Nice edit

I'd love to get my hands on that machine! Imagine upgrading it to the best P3's. Also, terminal based benchmarks without a desktop using up ram and CPU might be fun to see.

that's a pretty cool find at a garage sale. Thanks for showing

Seems that your computer have a S3 Savage 4 Pro GPU or something similar, which in Linux, is not really well supported by default. That's the reason you are locked at this resolution because it seems to be using the framebuffer and software rasterizer. You probably need to install xserver-xorg-video-savage to get it working properly, and, this package is not installed by default with xubuntu (Same with xserver-xorg-video-openchrome to get the VIA GPU working used in some thin clients). You can try installing this package and checking if the GPU is working. Also you can check if you have 3D acceleration with glxinfo, you probably have OpenGL support (But for a really old version)

🙂 have u tried any used older ATI or HD or Radeon cards? i remember hearing on a retro channel that they sometimes work better on ancient pcs, try an HD7570 or HD5670 or maybe something like a V4800 😀

Did you even have a driver for the integrated graphics? The only time I see just moving a window with nothing open become that slow is when there's no a proper video driver installed and I've seen better performance from my single cpu 900Mhz pentium 3 laptop I use to have from the same year.

Yay an akimbo P3-S system. Love it. Those were great. With good AGP cards it could rven run crysis at 20-30 FPS

Excuse me if I'm wrong, but how can you even run modern Firefox on a Pentium 3? I thought that browser no longer supported Pentium 3 CPUs and older due to lack of SSE2 instructions.

wow, that's a great video!

I have a stock Xseries 226. First time I had to convert an OS download (Ubuntu Server) to not even DVD but to CD. Just accepted it as a server though, no GUI. But wow does it still do absolutely epically as a server. Have about 5 different internet facing services running on it, and with only 1 CPU and 1 gig of ram, it barely uses any of it's resources and still runs quite happily.

How did you patch your Windows 7? which updates have you skipped? KB4088875? I have tried to install all the updates from "windows update". However once completed update installation, after reboot, my computer went died. Help my Pentium 3 !!! My spec Pentium 3 997Mhz 1G SDR ram 160G HDD

I have a Dell L1000R with a Pentium III and 256MB of RAM with Windows 7 and XP installed. I also have a EVGA GeForce 6200 installed in it as well. Supprising preformance now from a PC that orignaly had 16-Bit color max. Now can play Oblivion at times full speed at low settings.

I have the same pc. Is is VR ready? And if not what do I get to upgrade to make it so.

Have you thought of upgrading the system ripping all the parts out of it and putting new parts in it to make it better it will be like a sleeper workstation PC / Server

Thanks for the flashback at 3:05

Sad to hear that the PCIe to PCI adapter didn't pan out. Did you try an older generation card, perhaps?

Get the PCI version of the gt610, it would highly help

When you get a graphics card maybe you could also try antiX Linux? Few years ago I tried it on a Pentium M laptop with 512MB RAM and on a Celeron 333MHz PC with 384MB RAM and it worked pretty well on both. Latest version of it was released in 2018-12-28 so it's not some old abandoned Linux distro.

Please install one of the latest nvidia agp/pci cards. You may also want to use Debian or something based on Ubuntu 16.04 since in later releases legacy drivers have been removed from the repository (basically anything older than the 8*** series will not have graphics acceleration on the latest versions) .

i use Lubuntu on a 478 system with a SSD dual booted with XP and the thing is pretty quick. I have have Lubuntu on a Netbook with a SSD the thing is quit both are usable.

Try some windows manager like jwm or even twm or fvwm. Should work a lot better. Would be nice to see how can actually perform with a really light graphic interface.

how do I get the penguin club membership help please

I wonder if the new modern video cards use a 64bit initialization firmware making it impossible to post on a 32bit cpu. I guess if you had a Core Duo (not Core 2) you could see if it posts since that's a 32bit processor.

hey, can you revisit this machine again but with tiny 7 archive.org/details/Tiny7 it runs pretty well on any old machine, uses less then 256 megs of ram on boot and also only uses a couple gigs of hdd space

I wonder if this system supports older Pentium 4

You know, a bunch of the CPU power is going towards screen rendering when you use the basic display drivers...

If those cpus are dual Tualatin that system is faster than any atom system up until bay trail. Also, on pci you can get a gt 520. Anyway, if you can get any pci gpu newer than the GeForce 7/radeon x series you can get RU-vid 1080p60fps playback by using ie11 or by forcing h264 on RU-vid via h264ify.

I think that the gtx1060 may require a uefi bios. If i'm not mistaken, the last nvidia gpu to work in legacy bios is a gtx750 but your mileage may vary, so i would go with a older one.

I have a t430s. Any suggestions?

Please do another video with it running Windows XP and with an AGP graphics card.

I recommend Slitaz, Bodhi, or tiny core Linux for a system like this, paired with a more modern GPU by AMD or ATI even.

I take it you have to run 32 bit on there?

You say it runs horrendously at 1080P, power through it. I ran a single 500Mhz P3 at 1600X1200 (my GPU didn't support widescreen).

Puppy linux would run awesome in there!

That case looks nice. I wonder if i could get a computer case with a similar design to that IBM?

You are complaining that everything lags, but have only the unaccelerated driver selected in Windows 7 and the onboard graphics is quite slow. Put in a Geforce 6200 PCI and it will work much better

wow cool~

I have a Pentium III ThinkPad 570e running Windows XP fine(just don't even think of anything else than very basic tasks like mine sweeper or probably MS office ), didn't ever thought of running Windows 7 on the processor before XD

the p3s where strong cpus for the day

you chould use a geforce 6 agp card. that would support shader 3.0 and the windows 7 graphic effects.

I saved an old pentium 3 machine from the dumpster, but i don't know what i should do with it. It's too new to run dos games and too old to run recent software. I could salvage the components and use them for my electronics projects, but it would kinda break my heart to kill a PC that still runs great.

The case design is so slick for 2001/2002

I am using a computer with Intel Atom/1 gb ram (as my daily driver on Linux Mint 18.3) performing similar to the one used in this video. But it never fail to work. I still can watch video, edit images on Photoshop and edit documents using Libre Office.

That rendering on w7 is due to Microsoft warp renderer. On very fast cpus it can render faster than some low end gpus.

Just had a $56 T430 show up from eBay today.... Woooo, it's even in great shape. Something I feel you should appreciate. This is a cool machine though... I ran a similar system, self built based on an Abit VP6 FCPGA (dual) board. Rand dual coppermine celerons overclocked beyond pIII levels. Windows 2K was the way to go back then, as it was the only OS that took advantage of more than one cpu... Other than Server OS's.... which 2K sort of was, but sort of wasn't at the same time. Great era!

i had a Nvidia GT610 with a PCI interface which supports video acceleration and has HDMI out. Would be perfect for this machine but unfortunately it is a pretty rare card from Zotac and i sold it already since it didn´t fit inside my thinclient i was planning to upgrade for multimedia.

I still remember my old Olidata desktop with Pentium 3, 2001-2007 🥲

yeah you deff need a good AGP card or something

Try XP, no video drivers available for the integrated graphics on 7. Wiith a graphics driver or a video card it would probably be usable.

From the looks of it this system does not have an agp port, so try to get a high end pci video card and install Linux in the computer, dun do s portable installation, there should be no issue running linux

nailed that notepad tutorial

This opens up for the possibility of a follow up video with upgrades like dual Tualatins at 1.4 GHz and the best AGP card you can get.

Hopefully this rig has an agp as the pci doesn't have the bandwidth to cope. I think that's where most of the lag is coming from as the cpus have to compensate for the rendering of the websites etc.

I, install a pentium 3 with a microprocessor of 1gh and 375 mb of RAM and if you have performance, run well on a Windows xp s3.

I want... no, I NEED that case for putting inside it modern components. It would be a super duper cool gaming case.

oh wow this is actually an entertaining experiment. Pushing the limits of hardware at that age is fairly uncommon on RU-vid these days

I love these old Pentium III machines. I have an old dual cpu pentium iii rig running windows 2000 and it's great for an old machine.

you used the wrong watermark

You should have tried with XP, a VERY-LIGHTWEIGHT Linux, and 98 SE. Games and productivity. If you could make an update video. Especially with a PCI (of whatever best interface it has) GPU! Like maybe the best Voodoo card you could afford that would work with it.

Add a PCI 256MB FX 5500 Nvidia graphics card. I have that GPU with my Pentium III 1.2GHz single core running Windows 7 and 1GB RAM. AGP slot is missing I guess.

Getting windows 7 installed isn't too hard: You can either prepare a win7 setup usb stick and boot it via plop boot manager (cdrom) or burn a win7 recovery CD from another machine that runs win7 x86 (not 64bit!) and from there, once again starting the setup via cmd from a usb drive (or hdd)

You should do a review on the Lenovo Thinkpad x100e there nice little notebooks its better than the dell latitude 2120 in my opinion

Falling in love with this guy, like ^^

1.1 GHz does meet Microsoft's requirement of 1 GHz CPU for Windows 10. Also, I was able to get Windows 10 running on an old AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200+ PC from 2006 and it seems to run fine on it, even the 64 bit edition with 3 gb ram and a GTX 285.

Isn't this the PC that u had years ago and used for a Android OS and Windows 7 on a USB drive

if you insert ati3870 or Nvidia fx5500 and install drivers it will be ok :) I have retro build with pga478 celeron 2.4ghz 2gb DDR ram and fx5500 and it's working fine I play RU-vid on 480p

You need to get an old high end AGP card, and then do the test. I am pretty sure it will then be very useable...

TWO Pentium III, and even at 1.1 GHz each you say? What an unnecessary luxury! I just installed Xubuntu on a fine HP OmniBook 6000 with 512 MB of RAM (the maximum it can handle - interestingly only abou 430 MB of RAM is reported as usable, but that's another issue I'll figure out why that is later) - and a single Pentium III at 600 MHz ;) It's interesting that you've mentioned having tried Lubuntu: having read that LXQt should be less RAM hungry than XFCE I tried Lubuntu as well, however was greeted with a "What window manager do you want to use?"-dialog on a black screen - with no option to select. I finally got it running by manually editing some config text files, but several (setup) applications crashed and it just did not look that "styled through" like XFCE. And I quickly figured out that it does not make a big difference whether you're lacking 200 or 300 MB of RAM these days ;) So I switched back to Xubuntu (LTS 18.04, as this is the version which can be burned as "Minimal ISO" on a CD-ROM: the OmniBook does not boot from USB ;)) However I was pleasantly surprised that in my case almost all the hardware was supported "out of the box" without any hazzle: e.g. I have a 1024 x 768 (native resolution of the screen) true color display, touchpad works flawlessly (it even seems to recognise "two finger movements" to scroll up and down - no "gestures" like "zoom" of course, but still...), Ethernet and even my stone-age Wacom graphic tablet (connected via USB) is recognised and usable in Gimp - wow :) (Driver support for this mini tablet died long time off e.g. in MacOS X - the driver DVD still claims 10.4 support, but as far as I remember it stopped being usable already in MacOS X 10.6). I've never used the "PCMCIA" slot, but "Hardware Info" told me that there is even a driver loaded for this, so it might just work as well :) Of course for the rest: Firefox is slooooooow, Libre Office is "usable" for a couple of A4 pages I guess (text only ;)), but starting up e.g. Qt Creator (C++ IDE) and editing fairly simple C++ code works (memory usage is surprisinly modest still for such an IDE). Of course compiling C++ code on the other hand... better prepare a coffee or two ;) Unfortunately modern benchmarks do not seem to work: I've tried "sysbench" which immediatelly stopped with an "Illegal Instruction" exception, and I did not even try "geekbench", as the minimum CPU seems to be Pentium 4 (and 2 GB of RAM - ha!). But "Hardinfo" (sudo apt-get install hardinfo) does have some basic benchmarks. "But does it run... DOOM?" - yes! Well, sort of: unfortunately the GPU - an ATI Rage Mobility-M1 - does not have proper OpenGL driver support, so OpenGL is "software only" (Mesa driver). But when you "force software renderer" in the "Chocolate DOOM" port you get roughly 10 FPS. Bummer! My 486 (maxed out with some AMD 133 MHz CPU in the end) could do more at the time ;) But the take away: it is really surprising how much backwards-compatibility there is in Linux, so running a "modern OS" on such stone-age hardware is still possible - at least from a pure technical point of view ;)

Dat Refresh-Rate, yo. I remember when 009 Sound System was all over the place then. I miss the layout of that time, when Recommended for You and Related were both separate instead of just thrown together like a pile of unorganized paper these days. The 2009 layout was great

Man....to improbe gui you MUST install factory GPU drivers, obviously it's not recommended to install a " modern " dx10 or later card, because AERO effect Will degrade CPU and RAM performances. But maybe a x800 xt is the right card for this system to see overall improvements in gui lags.

I think the main issue here is the lack of a dedicated GPU. I mean, 2.2 GHz and 4 GB of slow RAM should be ok for Windows 7. I remember running it on an AMD Sempron 3000+ clocked at 1.8 GHz with 1 GB of DDR2, but I also had a dedicated GPU: NVidia FX-5500 (with AGP connection) if I remember correctly.

You are clearly held back by the inregrated GPU.Just sying, I get similar results on my Dual-Operon 12-core 16 GB of RAM when I use integrated SiS graphics.If I put a Firepro in, it flies.So, if you have an AGP slot in working order, just stick a 6200 in it if you can get your hands on one and try again.

If you want a relatively new version of Linux that will run well on that try Antix Linux, I've ran it on a single 1ghz Pentium 3 with pretty decent performance.

try using older gpus, such as gt 210 or 9400gt

You need a video card. Even an old nvidia 6800 would do you well. I have a dual socket single core AMD Athlon system with an ATI Radeon x1650 that plays youtube videos pretty good, and scales the screen pretty well for such older hardware. I do not recommend gaming, but it would definitely make the overall windows experience better. Aero isn't even running due to the lack of driver support on that system.

i recommend debian instead of any ubuntu distro on systems like this. That "System Problem"-Window is almost routine on pretty much any ubuntu distro these days. I always have to disable Apport (the service responsible for those messages) to get rid of it. I have a Gericom 1st Supersonic 1GHZ (yes, thats the product name) with one Pentium 3 clocked at 1Ghz, 512MB 133Mhz SDRAM, 10GB IBM Travelstar IDE HDD, Trident Video Accelerator CyberBlade -i1 GPU (with 8MB shared Memory). It is kinda usable, but i run into problems: for example, firefox won't let me print out stuff (PDF and Printer) and the website crashes, i cannot play any Video Files (i tried VLC, SMPlayer etc...), Standby obviously doesn't work either.

3:05 oh boy, that music :)

What a beutifull case!!!!!

Wish there were more scans of the free catalogs they had at the time filled with store adverts and prices, microtimes etc, because 4GB of ram back then must have cost as much as a nice car.

I can't wait for you to try it with a 6200 and 4GB of RAM... This machine is beautiful.

I really wanted to have an IBM PC back when IBM is still making computers before selling it to Lenovo. This is one sweet case. I am a huge fan of IBM Computers.

That free RS membership bit was accurate as fuck