My first Pentium 4 experience wasn't a good one (Part 1/2) 

P4 had this bad reputation from the very beginning. Hot, expensive RAM, much slower than P3 at the same clock.

It was also behind the curve on 64 bit implementation; which is odd to me since it looks like they were almost all the way there from a bus width standpoint. I remember at this time thinking that AMD was a step ahead Intel on the innovation front. The Athlon series of chips was/is a great set of CPUs and really drove the industry into the next era of x86 baser machines.

@@fffUUUUUU very true older p4 (Willamette e Northwood) had several flaws including hilariously expensive memory (the short lived rambus)

P4 always had bad reputation for being slow overpriced room heaters so it is not a new trend ;)

@@federicocatelli8785 Northwood? Not really. RAMBUS was pretty much a thing of the Socket 423/Willamette era.

Still got my Athlon XP though no longer in use, great machine, served me well doing art (comics) in Photoshop. At one point I had 5 60GB HDDs in it- one for the C: drive and then two RAID 1 pairs for data. Great machine :)

I remember a guy at my work was athlon and I was pentium, he was faster until the heat killed his athlon and his duron , I still have all my pentiums working today.

Depends on which P4 it was. First P4 were a bust but starting with P4 with HT had better user experience in Windows 2000/XP when you were running a lot of programs at one time and even in situations where you ran one 100% CPU time process P4 with HT didn't choke like as any single thread CPU would, even Athlon 64. Unlike broken dual core implementation of Athlon 64 X2 there were never any compatibility issues with having two threads in the system on Intel processors (which also made Pentium D of all things better choice imho over otherwise obviously superior Athlon X2... what good are two cores when they cause more issues for the users than solve issues anyways?). Also comparing clock vs AMD's PR rating P4s were generally faster, especially these with "800MHz" bus. What really made AMD system better was much much lower price. Athlons were very affordable and even someone like me who could not even afford non-Hyper Threaded P4 could still build nice fast Athlon XP system. Power draw was also higher on P4 but that is more of an issue of price adding more cost to the system for getting good PSU and cooler + additional power costs. During this era I eventually got Athlon XP 2500+@"3200+" and I think such Athlon + nForce 2 motherboard was they way to go for most people. Also non-HT Pentium 4 didn't really give anything for the price _BUT _ if someone had P4 with HT then imho such person had better user experience. Whether these improvements were worth all the added costs is disputable and mostly depends on the use case... and of course the short simple answer is the same as always with overpriced top end products which get obsolete quick: no :)

@@e8root You're very right on the UI. There were many situations with applications causing high CPU load that caused the OS to react sluggish on input events. Dual CPU systems didn't have that issue but were too expensive for home use. But HyperThreading really made a big difference and it was affordable. I remember that when the test machines at work were upgraded with HyperThreading P4's we immediately received an endless amount of hard to pinpoint multithreading bugs that simply did not show up on single thread machines before.

Up until a transport on the iffy open die Athlon XP chipped a nick out of it and breaks it. This style of processor was really delicate.

There are a wide multitude of P4 ThinkCentres - even in a couple different form factors - but typically great systems that are well-built. The IBM/Lenovo transition does leave many with harder-to-find support and drivers. Sometimes the CPUs need to be repasted as you said, but I'm glad they typically don't have bad capacitors.

@JL85FW socket 423 and 478 are definitely retro in my opinion since they cant really be used anymore for modern stuff and are 32 bit only. later lga 775 p4s can still run the latest version of windows 10 and even windows 11 with some modifications. however using a p4 on 775 doesnt really make sense to me since you can use a way faster core 2 cpu on the same platform

@JL85FW you can get windows 10 to work on a P4 but i think as soon as it gets updates, that's it the systems done for. Like running windows XP on a pentium 200 mmx, runs ok but as soon as service packs get added that's it.

@@talvisota327 socket 478 with universal agp slot to be exact, because it runs 3dfx even some older cards.

I have nothing but fond memories of the P4, so thanks for reminding me of the little aggravations. That stock black paste almost always yanked the chip, it was always good practice to twist/break the aluminum free before pulling but I’d never have remembered without seeing it happen again. And that heat sink mount, I always pulled the arms away like you did. But you can also slip a screwdriver somewhat through the arm and lever them off for tighter cases and board layouts.

Nope. This is way more dependent on ones emotions and border is fluid. I remember when people considered 386/486 retro when they were just 10-15 years old. I think it may be dependent on performance and capabilities, too. Socket 775 systems are still usable, even today for your basic Internet browsing, despite being about 15 years old now. Latest units with socket T are at least 10 years old, and that might be contributing factor too. Trying to use 486 back in '99 for normal work would be quite a chore.

I have an 800 MHz Athlon under my desk right now! :) I use it for ca. 2000 gaming, and I've never had any problems with it. In my experience, the thing about VIA is that their drivers were finicky, but if you have the ones that shipped with your MB, they're typically fine.

@talldude123 In 2004 you could play all games on it and if you were not then it was because of GPU. The issue with Celeron was that getting much faster AMD system was possible with less money. I had Celeron 1.8GHz@2.2GHz around this time because the CPU was almost for free and it wasn't half bad. More like 1/3 bad compared to random Duron that had even less cache XD Eventually got Athlon XP and also at 2.2GHz the difference in FPS was staggering. On the defense of Celeron: not being able to push as many frames per second made me use higher resolutions in games that I otherwise would so CPU speed didn't matter as much.

@@msthalamus2172 You should be able to run a copy of ut2004 (from year 2004) just fine on 800 ( even a duron ) but graphicswise - mini for good experience online in onslaught would be a Ati 9600 ( nvidia 5700 -a generic 300wat powersupply might not do) -both would do .I had a barthon downclocked to like 900, Nvidia 4200 struggled in onslaught - the 9800 did very well ( a nvidia 440 mx could play deathmatch in 640x ,4200 in 800x -a tnt2 would be 320x and low) , Ati 850 (800) no problem anywhere in the game

Yes, P4 should be able to play YT as long as GPU does all the decoding and web browser is GPU accelerated. Nice exercise but kinda pointless :)

@@e8root this is why its hard to even give away a P4 system...(to a non-geek) unless, like you said, it has a GPU to play YT

can it play anything higher than 480p smoothly?

Going on holiday for a week on monday but will to finish the editing this weekend.

@@RetroSpector78 👍👍

Best DOS machine is with Pentium 3 (or Tualating Celerons) and 440BX chipset with ISA slot. Some Pentium 4 motherboards, especially early ones were also fine because they did support DMA audio interrupts for PCI sound cards which emulated Sound Blaster. This might not be common knowledge but newer systems and also a lot of AMD systems of the time did not support Sound Blaster compatibility at all. I personally am aiming at building Tualating 440BX retro system. Had one with 440LX and Pentium 2 but I want Tualatin :)

There was also Prescott. Some of them were even 64-bit. I am not sure if you can run newest Win10 64-bit but definitely Win7 64-bit can run on P4 and since these CPU's had SSE3 they are still supported in many modern software unlike many of Athlons and Athlons 64. Also at one time, particularly Pentium D (it was not P4 but pretty much also were, just two of them at once) was giving better dual core experience than Athlon X2. Slower and much more power inefficient but Pentium D just worked. Just like Core 2 Duo just worked, no issues with having two cores at all.

​@@e8root Back in the day I had a Northwood with HyperThreading and was very, very happy with it for a couple of years. I still have to get my hands on a 478 Prescott though. It should be interesting to explore for the reasons you've mentioned. In my opinion, "Pentium 4" actually means an exceptionally wide range of possible performance and features. I think it is comparable to the whole socket A line of CPUs.

Luckily I only lost one redundant pin. System isn’t super stable now (managed to fix the corrupt bios) so will need to investigate that

@@RetroSpector78 Yeah, if the CPU isn't receiving all the power it needs-- and P4s need a *lot* of power-- it could certainly result in system instability. Luckily, I think P4s are practically given away on Ebay these days. :)

They planned to go up to 10Ghz but it was never to be, too much power and cooling required.

"...they went back and started again from the Pentium 3 when developing the 4's successor." That's a common misconception. The next gen (Core2 series) was independently designed from both the P3 and P4 groups. One of the few things that might have been similar between the P3 and Core2, was going back to a shorter instruction pipeline. For the P4's, having a long instruction pipeline plus a bad branch prediction slowed things down considerably.

@@anomaly95 P4 successor was Core. Core 2 was much later. And Core had a lot from P3 in its architecture.

Pentium M, a version of PIII, was used. The mobile variety ran cooler.

Not really. The Core architecture was developed independently and in parallel by a different group.

Trust me, your friend got the better end of the deal, he got tools to make fire where as you got the FIRE.

Ah yes the early P4's had only 256kbyte of cache. Which KILLED performance. P4's REQUIRED a lot of cache. Worse were the Celerons with even less cache. Sure it had the Ghz but... not the performance.

@Jessica💋 Sweety Hotgirl - Vlogs : THAT! Everyone that I know had a P4 said exactly the f.ing same. A school colleague of mine had a chilligreen P4 2.8ghz machine with a radeon mobility 9500... this thing after half an hour ut2k3 or 2k4 was practically a stove. I swear you could have boiled eggs or a pot with potatoes on that thermonuclear notebook.

@@MasticinaAkicta makes me wonder how fast the Tulsa NerBurst xeons like 7410m with 16MB L3 perform

True but actually Geforce FX would be even better (not GF6 though as it lacks 16-bit dithering making some older games ugly as hell... for the same reason Radeons 9500+ might not be good idea, though they did have dithering which worked at long as AA was used... at least personally I'd go with GF FX 59xx) and Audigy 2ZS or even 2ZS Pro / 4 Pro. Also there exist motherboards for Core 2 with Win98 compatibility and those might be even better... or maybe not because Win98/ME does get unstable when CPU is too fast so fast P4 might be the best actually./

Yeah but still its a poorly designed system IMHO.

@@RetroSpector78 It really was a tragic mess of a design. Had to deal with that on a regular basis when I built those at a mom and pop shop back in the day.

@@RetroSpector78 Without question it's horrible. Third party coolers were even worse and frequently broke the bracket (I'm lookin' at you, Zalman!). Just saying that once the OEM clip is free, you can lift the cooler straight up instead of at an angle and can reduce the likelihood of bending pins when the CPU is stuck to the cooler. Very much looking forward to the next video!

In this one’s defense : it has some beige parts. Identity crisis :)

It wasn’t the video card. Bios was corrupted and the fact that you have zero video output made it very difficult to debug. But managed to fix it. Stay tuned for part 2

@@RetroSpector78 i speak very bad i think my english is not so good i am referring to a computer bios , but a pci video card is needed on those cases to display something on the screen on this computers in the case of older pentium there's no agp and only pci and need an isa video card to display what's happening.

WinME gets bad reputation but then comes retro computer and on WinME you can plug usb stick and it just works (if its FAT32 formatter of course) and Win98 not so much ;) But yeah, I didn't use WinME either because it lacked DOS and was even less stable than Win98 if that was even possible.

Rambus was worse for latency right?

@@6581punk Those newer Pentium 4's don't use RDRAM

Not really. Core i9 is much much better for that purpose :D

I think this would apply to Prescott, Northwood are OK. I actually quite like them.

@@Paar86 One Pentium 4 is nothing. Two Prescotts aka Pentium D 8xx overclocked to 4GHz were more like it

Also have no experience with them. When I started collecting there were so many (cheap) pentium 4 computers on the market. But was focussed more on < pentium3 machines.

@Phoenix 𝙾𝚙𝚎𝚗 𝙼𝚢 PROFILE I'm not knocking the P4 at all. While my own experience with a Sony Viao P4 wasn't great, we used a lot of them at work, and they ran well, which leads me to believe my Viao was just a crap laptop.

Is that the brand? I have a case which appears to have the same chassis (but different front panel) and had trouble finding information about it.

@@eDoc2020 This case looks like it : Sweex Case Prescott D4 Miditower And I found a old 2nd hand advertisement of mine from 2006, describing it as an SWEEX midi tower.

@@NLTheGreater I can only find two or three pictures of a Sweex case online. Maybe the same factory was making different cases for several smaller brands.

Celeron 2.1 was not good Doom 3 CPU. I know because I had Celeron 2.2 and it ran like wet dog :)

@@e8root well yeah, but I was happy to walkthrough the game in 25-30 fps, also with effects that geForce 3 ti200 can show :D

32 only

There are some 64-bit Pentium 4 CPUs - especially on Socket 775

@@armanelgtron4533 this is a Socket478

@@mustangrt8866 there were a couple of 64bit 478 Pentium 4s, special order by IBM

there is one listed on ebay

Somebody gave me a Dell Optiplex "mini PC" with a 32-bit Pentium 4 CPU in it. I upgraded the BIOS, stuck in a 64-bit HT Pentium 4 CPU in it and put the maximum 3GB RAM in it. As I run (Gentoo) Linux by default, it makes a reasonable machine for lite browsing and general office stuff.

And the 2nd latest Pentium EEEE 990FX can be a real treat to use

I have a week off now and spending a week with family. But I’ll announce something soon.

@@RetroSpector78 okay that semms nice

I did. Turned out fine. Problem was with the bios. Documentation on how you update the bios on this board didn’t help, or the bootloader that looks up the bios file on a floppy was also corrupted. But did manage to do it in the end. Stay tuned for part 2

It seems like people only want to call things "retro" if it was new when they were teenagers, no matter how old they get :D

Part 2 coming up :) wanted to diagnose first and make sure I would be able to bring the board + cpu back to life

This was the 845PE / 845GE chipset with IDE support. 865 came later.

@@RetroSpector78 Correct, I had 845 too but I killed it by mistake - oh well. :(