Intel Pentium D 945 3.4 GHz Review 

They cooled decently for its day, but if I knew about getting decent thermal paste then, I would probably seen better temps out of those. Also possibly the last CPUs that don't report temps inside Windows easily. Was in awe when finally the Athon64s could do so.

I had a Pentium D 820 Optiplex GX620 SFF back in the day with a 6450 or something, ran great, 1080p video playback even without hardware acceleration and built in hand warmer when you switch the fan around to exhaust out the front as this dropped the HDD temps from 50C+ to 30C lol. :P

Budget-Builds Official Presler: an early example of a "glued together" processor. What a stupid idea. It will never catch on :^)

Yes, the old Boxed Coolers with the Copper Core cooled much better, and also were quieter at idle than the new 1151 Boxed coolers (the one from my G4560 had a very annoying hum)

yeah 775 stock coolers were whisper quiet, the 115x ones are horrible.

Hehe :D

Hehehehe

During winter, I turn on my Core2Duo E7500 2.93 GHz system on and let Folding@Home run. I recently found a Core2Quad Q8200 2.3 GHz and put it in that system. Seems to be running hot on IDLE >50 C while ambient is 28 C.

Same but with a fx 6300.

Should have bought Pentium D 8xx thugh. Much better heaters. Actually 65nm Netbursts weren't even all that hot unless you did crazy overclocking past 4GHz.

@Kyle Andrews If your mainboard can take up to 8GB then you have newer LGA 775 boards. Most of the LGA 775 boards of that era (2005-2008) when the Pentium D was around can only take up to 4GB of SDRAM. My rig with 4GB of RAM runs Windows 7 x64 with a nVidia Quadro 2000 graphics card quite fast.

@Kyle Andrews Yes I know about ReadyBoost, but I don't really need it as it is already plenty fast for my needs.

@Kyle Andrews The D945GTP boards can take up to 8GB of RAM, but only 4GB will be recognized. Intel designed it so builders can use newer higher capacity RAM which can be switched over to newer boards like the D955 boards.

you can also get a 3 ghz core 2 duo for a few dollars which is probably a better choice... they are much faster and consume less power

I see what you did there ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Juan Jose 945mm

@@camthesaxman3387 Given Core 2 do everything twice as fast per clock this is no wonder. Even before Core 2 times however Pentium D had one great advantage over Athlon 64 X2: everything worked correctly. Not a widely known fact but dual core K8 were not compatible with Windows XP due to the way internal core timers were implemented. For retro XP rig going with Athlon X2 would be nonsensical choice over Pentium D... though imho for XP for PCI-E system the best choice is Sandy/Ivy Bridge or at least Nehalem and for AGP going with Core 2.

@@e8root K10 multicore ala Phenom II X4 or X6 would be a decent choice too, and actually, Bulldozer/PIledriver is a similar story to K8 multicore for XP in that it was never optimized for Bulldozer where Win7 and newer had optimizations released that accounted for Bulldozer's different multithreading scheme, so an FX-8350 would run slower than a Phenom II X6 1090T on XP simply due to lack of optimizations on that older version of Windows for the FX part where the Phenom II just ran a normal multithreading scheme akin to what you'd find on a C2D or a C2Q/C2E in which each core/thread had all unique resources vs. Bulldozer sharing an FPU between cores, for example.

i just remember my old 32mb ram sticks..

Çetin Halil ÇİFTÇİ I think my last system with 32mb sticks was a Pentium Pro 200.

mharris1270 I picked up a CPU in a pawn shop labeled as a q6600 after removing a damn sticker from the heat spreader I found out it was a Pentium Dual Core e2180 (a 2GHz conroe core 2 duo with 1MB of cache vs the e4400 with 2MB) I'm just starting to test it with my ASRock 775i65G R3 to see how it compares with my 3.2 P4. 540J

Yea that's something I could look into for another video, but games is really what I do, not workstation stuff, or checking out old video encoding software.

And that's my main argument when "defending" these netburst processors. People had a great time, played a ton of games and have good memories :)

@KimuTone yes but overclocking in this case provides a great experience for games utilizing only a single core.

Phill, I also noticed that you carefully started to go into a more modern era, and very interesting time to me also. If next video will involve Core 2 duo, this around 2006. And in November 2006 Win Vista arrived. So))) I no there is a lot of haters of this OS. But if you remember your own video about Millennium Education, there was nothing terrible about. So if it Possible in 2006 will be very interesting comparison of Win XP 32 bit SP2, 64bit SP1 against Win Vista vanilla edition. But off course it’s only idea. And also I couldn’t find Vista vanilla edition build 6000. Minimum is SP1. But it from 2008. I made such compassion in my own on Core 2 Duo E6700, 4 gb DDR 2 1066, GF 8800 GTS 640 mb, SB X-Fi. WD Raptor 160 gb 10 000 RPM

Incidentally AMD charged more for their CPU's starting from X2 up until Core 2 came out. Pentium D systems were actually cheapest dual core processors you could buy. Hopefully AMD doesn't return to these pricing strategies...

@@e8root yeah))) until 2020))) when Rayzen systems started growing up in pricing))

Circle of life, round and round. Interesting when Empire will strike back?)

Nice. What sort of programs did you run that showed most of the benefit with the second core?

Honestly the main benefit was being able to have way more stuff open at the same time. Like being able to have a video playing while browsing the web and editing pictures, or having my own music playing while running games.

I have never owned either the Pentium 4 nor the Pentium D.

First computer I built with parts that weren't given to me from scrap PCs had a C2D E8400! That thing was a beast!

Vitor Barbosa I had that C2D e8400 too, it was a massive upgrade from my Sempron 2800+ (which for it's time was honestly quite good). It also lasted me for a long time.

In 2006 I went from a P4 3ghz hyper threaded cpu to a C2D E6400. Those early C2D's were an incredible leap in power back in 2006. I started with a 7950GT gpu and I currently have a R7 250 in it. I was able to play modern games until 2012. That was when I switched to a Core i5 rig as my every machine.

@@VitorBarbosa I just got a cpu bundle with three E8400 for about $1 a piece lol

Quake 4 doesn't have a benchmark I believe. I haven't heard of UT3?

There is a benchmark tool for Quake 4 around, which basically runs a timedemo. If you search for "quake 4 benchmark tool", you'll find it in no time. Unreal Tournament 3 was the third instalment of the great UT-series released in late 2007. There is a benchmark tool for this game around too. :)

Yes 👍

Yes you can see this in the results.

I don't mean semi usage of the cores, I mean games that take full advantage of multiple cores. ie Unreal Tournament 3 does have duel core capabilities but only about 50% of each core is utilized, and when you disable the 2nd core, the 1st core is running at almost 100%. I'm not saying your tests were a waist of time because those are era accurate games. I'm just saying that games that came out much later are better at using duel or quad core CPUs But, again, they're probably too advanced to run on a Pentium D.

Thats what I thought when I saw 3dmark 2001, almost nooone had a dual core PC back then and almost nothing was optimized for multicore in Windowsland, multiprocessors at that period, also the Pentium D, were good for rendering, compiling source, web servers and heavy multiprocessing, particularly good in Linux where compiled from source program can take advantage of multiprocessing.

@@GTXDash 👍

you should do it man. i have mine paired with a hd 7770 and sometimes a 650ti , and i run xp on it. games from the 360 era run smooth like butter. and i can take advantage of EAX

Yeah I've been digging through my basement since I mentioned it.. Found a GTX 780 card I thought I had sold, hah! That should work in XP, right?

I knew a guy who went from pentium mmx 233 to athlon 64 2 GHz-ish. Those were launched only 5 years appart but a factor 20 ish difference in performance.

I liked my 2GHz P4. But eventually it just got too old.

Not that I thought a lot about noticing it but I once upgraded from a single core p3 to a quadcore c2q, my first real gaming pc and thing is I got all my four pcs left mostly intact.

A GPU only supports specific codecs in hardware decoding so unless the video is encoded with one of them it wouldn't do any good.

what codec? it probably wont work with H265 however H264 should run smoothly

I think today you could play h264 1080p movies just fine. It took some years for video decoders to go multi-core. And if this still would not be enough to play some movie then it is not like you could play these movies on Athlon X2 64. They were faster but only slightly faster and mostly where memory latency was important. Netburst was doing fine in video decoding/encoding stuff.

I have one in a tin with a couple of other cpu's.

and then another cop runs you over....

I remember reading about boosts in 3D Rendering, and video encoding, like DivX. Games at the time benefited very little.

3800Tech I'm not well versed in CPU design but it seems more pipes equals bad. AMD FX should have been avoided entirely. Just like Intel they backed the opposite idea to the one that worked before

More pipeline stages (longer pipeline) allows higher clock ceiling as each stage is simpler and takes less time to complete a task. This allows each stage to compete and move and buffer/latch the data at the next stage without missing the clock deadline so to speak. This usually also means to keep a chip size in check less overall pipe lines are used, but mainly because each stage is simpler it has less IPC capability. It's a small trade off in order to get the performance via clock speed assuming that a process can deliver the clocks it was designed for. The other thing is BPU and cache miss hit penalties are much bigger, Netburst actually had designs to allow really fast recovery. The issues were the process, netburst was designed for 10Ghz Actually FX pipeline are only low 20s hardly anymore than intel xxxLake and Zen today. There was some really good designs in FX but it was never designed for desktop type environment, biggest issues from FX was the BPU high clock cycle penalty (unlike netburst it had no mitigation for the penalty) and somewhat low association way count on the L1 instruction cache, both which are important in desktop applications where parallelism is low. It actually did pretty well in many real world server database applications where AMD targeted, wasn't blowing away Xeon but performance per watt in heavy parallel database stuff it sure gave them a run for the money and bang for buck was a lot better. There was a few other compromises for power efficiency with FPU layout that also didn't help desktop use but was perfectly fine one for server use. FX was never really designed for high clock speed either, but some improvement in transistor driving and few other important transistor changes allowed them to clock it way beyond what it was intended, it was an amazing feat really to get those clocks with such a large process with a design that was only intended for high 3 GHz and use as little (relative) power as they did.

Don't bother with the FX, the prices people are asking are stupidly over inflated. I wanted to get a 8370e to have a bit of a OCing play around over my current 8320 as mine is a dud, needs to run below stock voltages to keep it from crashing so I can't get over 4.1 as I can't increase the voltage, even stock increasing the voltage hard locks the PC. Anyway I got my 8320 board and ram for nothing 2 years ago as they were worth nothing then. People now want more than the MRSP at release for a 2nd hand CPU. 8370e a OEM targeted sort of low power one is not any less than 300AUD and as much as 380 I saw. MSRP was 190 USD in 2014. All of the 8xxx FX CPUs are like that, up to 2x the new price as 2nd hand. I wouldn't pay anymore than $20 for one. Can't work out what is wrong with the market for FX CPUs.

Absolute best bang for buck new everything with quite a decent level of performance is the AMD 2200G and achieve great results overclocked, you don't even need s GPU as it has a Vega 8 built into the CPU which OCs well. It does need fast dual channel ddr4 to get the most out of it but still comes out on top being so cheap and boards for them less than 100 bucks, typically about 70 USD mark. The box cooler is also decent so again great value.

I've never understand why they simply didn't do another Northwood with all the Prescott features except the 31-staged pipeline. I mean, if they already saw Prescott's problems in the lab back in 2001, what hopes did they had this would scale to 4 GHz and beyond? I know high clocking is literally the only thing Netburst can do well, but I mean, Northwood was good. It's a more mature implementation of the Willamette architecture. Imagine having it's 20-staged pipeline and the rest of the benefits from Prescott (SSE3, better branch prediction, more L1 and L2 cache, etc.). It could have been the best Netburst CPU architecturally.

+Nael AMir Goz: It didn't make any sense to buy a Pentium 4, Pentium 4 HT, Pentium D but since Intel is the big name, average joe bought Intel. Even today, I meet people who have never herd of AMD.

If you did a lot of video transcodes, the Pentium 4 was great for it, but that is like the only area where it really "won" and eventually GPU transcodes where much much faster lol

The D805 was highly recommended by Custom PC mag back in the day as it was a brilliant budget overclocker, I got an extra 800MHz out of it on just air cooling. Best "Bang for your buck" at the time.

There was someone on a forum I used to frequent who extoled the virtues of overclocking a pentium 4 celeron. Overcooked celery we called it.

same here, it's so bizzare it's cool, recently I build myself one with junk I found and a Pentium D 945 just for fun.

I have a few retro systems running the socket 478 Pentium 4s. I have had no problems getting good performance in older games with the Pentium 4. It all depends on what you are going to use your system for. For older Windows titles the Pentium D works a treat.

Yeah I played for hours and hours with one back in the day and never had any problems

I have a Cedarmill p4 631 3.0GHz w/ HT 2gb of ram in a tower collecting much dust. It's not good enough for me to give away I'd feel bad for anyone who might have to use a single core cpu these days. Good if I ever need a really really stupidly fast dos machine i guess.

@@bdhale34 might make for a good Win98 retro machine

Does it sound like a jet engine? Sure does make you think of a continuos yawning.

Having both a C2D e4500 2.2GHz AND a Athlon 64 x2 4200+ 2.2GHz I can say without question using the same components, except the motherboard and CPU, that the Athlon, though testing lower in some things, is a far more responsive and usable system. The competition seems to have been slightly manipulated by the widespread use of the Intel assembler (which at the time has since been proven to artificially slow down anything not registering as Genuine Intel by using slower code paths on purpose even if the faster code was supported by the non Intel chip.) Intel was playing very very dirty back then, forcing slower code execution on the competition with their assembler (which was the most used because it was the fastest) and also paying off OEMs to not use AMD chips as much or at all. That isn't to say the e4500 was a bad chip or that the system wasn't quite nice under XP and to a lesser extent Windows 7 because it is still quite nice, it is simply that the Athlon at the same clock speed was a much faster chip in reality.

Should look after something like a hd 5770, really cheap too find due too their age & being a common midrange card, or a hd 4000 series card. (I'd go for sapphire or any other brand before xfx though on the hd 5000 series. Got one dead xfx hd 5770 that died after some benchmarking & crossfire action with my 8 year old sapphire hd 5770 lite. (Bought for my gaming rig back in 2010.) Googling the behavior i got out of it's trying too indicate there is a short somewhere. But it did that even without a cooler mounted on the damn thing or even a fan plugged into it. (had a 2000 rpm 120mm fan on it just too see if i could get an image from it still while it had no cooler on it.) So i just assume it's dead atm, currently sitting without a cooler mounted on in my shelf of dead parts next too a xfx HD 5750 i bought for the third party cooler on it. Which turned out too be having a bent bracket (apparently the seller did it too fit it on properly on the card as its a third party pcb design.) & 2 bad screw holes that has a hard time sticking into the coolers mounting plate unless you start leaning on the card with the screwdriver pushing the bracket down 80% of the way.)

iRaziel1, that's 8GHz worth of chip vs 4.4GHz of chip though. if that c2d wasn't significantly faster there would be some other major issues. I have a Athlon II x4 645 3.1GHz as well it is overclocked to 4GHz on all cores stays below 50c even under synthetic loads, the original x2's overclocked pretty well also with the right motherboard. Intel had a severe ipc deficiency until the first core i series of chips and then they also jumped pretty far ahead in i/o performances as well which likely had more to do with the boost in raw performance than the cpu actually did.. The c2d and c2q chips could never really keep up mhz for mhz.

My 645 is in a 785G board the c2d is in a an intel desktop board nothing fancy really but it's nowhere near as responsive or fast as the x2 in the board the Athlon II currently occupies. Intel made up for a lot of it's problems with raw speed that didn't help the lower clocked chips out any though.

Sounds like YOU should be doing such a video! Emulation and VM doesn't really interest me.

Many peoples wallets can’t shell out for newer hardware. I like how Phil goes after getting old affordable parts to make great retro machines. There is some special magic in running games on old hardware...just not the same as running old games on new hardware & Win10.

Maybe later, but not at the moment, we are checking out mostly Intel stuff right now. Adding another system is double the work, so I like to avoid that.

Yea because I use a newer P35 board, SSD and fast RAM, all the systems felt responsive and snappy.

PhilsComputerLab That's cheating ;-)

Yo I'm about to do the same thing bro, how did yours end up?

It's a fun hobby! Careful, you might get addicted :D

I have seen that, it's fun hobby and many of friends can't understand it :D. Maybe it's just world/vision what only PC enthusiasts can understand

For a 2009 XP-RETRO-GAMING-PC is AM3 the way to go. The Athlon X3 450/455/460 are cheap and easy to find on eBay. When you need a fast GPU you can go up to a the AMDs R7 200 and R9 200-Series :-) the HD6850 is a good and cheap Option for XP. :-)

I know, I see a lot of channels run modern games on these old chips, but they all run bad, or at 320x200 lowest details. I like to show games that run fairly decent and are suitable.

Ya true. Thanks for the reply. Though there are a suite of games that are more demanding than the ones running at 100+ fps here that are maybe 1/2 generation ahead that run at 30-60.

I did try Crysis, but it wouldn't run. Could be the graphics card, but not sure. What games are you thinking off?

Great question! Here's a list of classic games I like from this era: Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Assassin's Creed 1 or 2, Bioshock, Company of Heroes, Overlord, Flatout 2, Just Cause, Serious Sam 2, Devil May Cry 4, Team Fortress 2, GRID, Tomb Raider: Underworld, Left 4 Dead 1 or 2, Portal 2, Total War Rome, LEGO Batman or Star Wars. Or other early gen Xbox 360 game ports. My point being is that you find that line of what is (surprisingly) playable on each given set of hardware. I've been doing this with a computer I found on the street with a Radeon HD 3000 iGPU.

Adding a wired or wireless Xbox 360 controller might help too.

If it's Northwood then it's 478, the Pentium D is socket 775.

I know it will only take a northwood or a prescott with that socket, the early model will take up to 3ghz but the late model will take up to 3.4ghz.

you always have to worry about a Prescott cpu catching on fire

Yea games preferred a fast singe core at that time.

They have higher IPC, so although clock is lower, they are much faster per clock.

That Pentium 4 has Hyper-Threading, so that will help. I might take a look at the Celeron 420 soon.

There were Pentium Ds with separate dies and ones with the cores on a single die. The delta provided different TDPs. That’s why there are Pentium D’s running at 95w and others running at 130w.

Definitely need a really good cooler like the Hyper Evo 212 for these 130w CPUs.

@@mesterak I should update you, I did a suicide run with that chip and managed an OC of 5 GHz although it was incredibly unstable. I did manage 4.8 tho with a geekbench run to which I can link you the run if yer interested C:

@@Celeron_619 sure please share

@@mesterak browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/15548318 Here you go C:

@@Celeron_619 that’s awesome thanks!

You should identify the motherboard first, then find out what CPUs and RAM it supports. Then take it from there. Lots of old-school LAN games like Quake III, Halo should run just fine on such machines.