The Last of the Netburst Lineage: Pentium 4 661 

Really glad I held onto my 661 all these years, they are getting hard to find. Excellent video again Phil - I should dig mine out of storage and play around with it now that winter is coming in North America I could use a machine to heat my office ;)

Last years winter i played with a pentium 4 640 with ati radeon 2600pro agp. That was very nice too. For this years winter i decided to go with a core2 duo 8500 with a ati radeon 4850. Nice video again, phil.

I got one of the first P4 with HT, and I loved the dang thing and didn't even overclock it as it was in a shuttle style PC. I previously had a 478 Celeron, and a 754 Sempron, so I obviously thought the P4 was amazing.

I used to have a P4 3.8 GHz Prescott system back in the day and it was an oven! Especially since I live in Brazil, so the weather does not help in my part of the country. Back in those days, air conditioning was only for the richest families, so I had an open window and a fan running for many hours of the day. I ended up changing the case (the new one featured two very large intake fans) and buying an aftermarket cooler (a Zalman copper cooler than kind of looked like a flower). I still loved that system, though. So much so that the new case had an acrylic window, blue LED in the fans, colt cathode lights (also blue), and IDE cables that were round to maximize airflow. If memory serves, I used to have a XFX Geforce 6800 GT. It did not work properly and gave me lots of artifacting. So I returned it and got a Radeon X1650 instead. Back then I played a lot of Company of Heroes, UT2004, NFS Carbon, and some other stuff. Phil's point about nostalgia is spot on. A Core 2 Duo makes more sense from all sorts of different perspectives, but maybe it does not make us feel the same way because it is a different piece of hardware compared to the one we used to have back in the day. Sometimes feelings will come before practicality! Nowadays I have a Pentium 4 2.0 GHz Northwood. I run Windows XP on it and a bunch of classic games I got from GOG. Most are from the Win 95-98 era, like Interstate 76-82, Moto Racer, Giants Citizen Kabuto, Total Annihilation, and stuff like that. Great little system with a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 and a Samsung 17" monitor. I'm looking for a new videocard, though. That Geforce MX 4000 is just bad. It's hard to find a working Direct X 9.0c card around here...

Excellent video. I think I can safely say I've experienced most flavors of consumer intel cpus. Up to 7th gen that I've owned, I've played with newer while building systems for people of course lol. If you can put one together, a fast rambus board and 1.7ghz cpu is surprisingly capable. I actually got windows 7 running on it! 2gb ram. I could go on and on about various systems, so I'll just say my asrock 4coredual vsta 2.0 system was probably the most fun and flexible

Back in the day and on a budget I built myself an AMD AthlonXP 2400 with a Geforce4 ti4200 It ran Farcry so well. My only frustration was when Battlefield2 came out, I was forced to change videocards as the Ti4200 didn't support the required pixel shader. It was frustrating as I saw that my old card was much faster then most of the following FX cards. So I think I changed it for a Radeon 9650 if memory serves me well. Back in the day my friend got a Pentium4 1.7 Wilamette... It had atrocious performance. I later built myself a socket 939 Athlon64 x2 3800 which was amazing. My old Athlon XP was upgraded to a barton 3000+ and I gave it to my friend.

I also had a 2,6GHz Northwood P4 back in the day, the first CPU I bought with my own money. Yes, in retrospect I should have gone AMD, but I was young, stupid and drank too much Intel kool-aid 😀. But yeah, lots of fond memories of that PC, especially after I got a Radeon 9800 Pro to go along with it. And yes, I'm pretty sure the Northwood had hyperthreading. And since I'm now old and nostalgic for the good old days, I built myself a mostly identical PC last year 😃

Nice setup as always! You give us back the nostalgic feeling! All that nice hardware and software, a blast from the past. I had a P4 HT 3200 Prescott on a S478 Asus P4P 800 SE, 1 GB DDR 400 (2x512 MB Kingston), PowerColor ATI 9800 SE 128 MB DDR, soft-modded with Omega drivers, but it said still using 4 ROPs for a reason unknown to me. When I now read forums people back then wrote the PowerColor one was one of those with high change for soft-modding. The result would be somewhat below ATI 9600 Pro or so. At least it was faster than with standard Radeon drivers. Until the mainboard died of overheating, 120 watts idling on desktop, in summer 52 °C desktop, 72 °C CPU temp and even reboots, ouch. RIP 2004-2008. Well, the mainboard died, the CPU still works (ran at 2800 MHz in a BIOS locked Celeron 2800 mainboard), the RAM and still exists, GPU was given to a pal, after having repaired it twice (oiled fan and repaired the voltage regulator at the back). The Intel boxed cooler was a very bad one for such a 89-103 W CPU, I won't even use it for a 65 W CPU nowadays. After the mainboard died I went for power efficient PCs only, used better cooling solutions ofc. and even bought low TDP GPUs since then like ATI 4550 512 MB GDDR3, Nvidia GT 1030 2 GB GDDR5, but they do work quite well. Nowadays on my main Win 10 machine I play old 4:3 games with 1440x1080 using dgVoodoo2 maxing anything out, but not using Phong Shaders, which eat very much resources. The fast memory access is a very nice feature to get free performance. Ofc. there's some widescreen patches for some games, but I don't need those, tbh. I also use MSI Afterburner with Riva Tuner and limit the FPS to 60 mostly, because I don't need like 300 FPS in games like NFS HP2 heating up the machine for nothing. If Riva Tuner won't show the stats no matter which overlay method you try, then Trigonesoft Remote can help using Android, but it needs LAN for that. It uses the same RTSS (Riva Tuner Statistics Server), shows CPU, GPU load and FPS. For Anno 1800 I even like to lock it to 30 FPS, having a more fluid gameplay on a Core2Duo E8400 or i5-3570 using a slow GT 1030 GDDR5 in both systems, because I like low power systems. It hardly runs on that GPU, but at 30 FPS it actually is playable and it's more fluid than with 40-50 FPS and 100 % CPU demand. So there's some room for newer games on old systems. And ofc. lower res than 1920x1080 also is possible. People tested some Steampunk 2077 with 1080p and 900p ish, making a huge difference on medium fast GPUs and old CPUs. Indeed, old games were super sharp and had no crappy HDR/blur effects you can't turn off. NFS HP 2010 version is an example I can't play, because I can't see the road being full of effects and steering also is catastrophic in this game. NFS III, 4, HP original, U1, U2 is what I enjoy to play and it still looks good using dgVoodoo2, 1080p, FSAA, fast memory access, no mip-mapping also is more sharp I think. When seeing you playing Far Cry, the vents remind me of a level in XIII, another great game with cel shading and some stealth parts. I don't have a P4 or AMD XP anymore, but at least C2D E8400 3 GHz and Athlon II x2 260 3.2 GHz, so one generation after P4. A pal still has an Athlon 64, still having the old XP installation on the HDD, but not used in ages. One could make a copy of that HDD with Disk2VHD just to keep it for VMs, because that's a very easy way I discovered when we did copy old laptop's XP to our Linux laptops, continue using good old apps. What's still a mystique for me is Pentium III dual CPU and AMD MP dual CPU machines. We see much MP Xeons nowadays, but the old ones are rare. Ofc. there's also PowerPC G4 dual and G5 dual, but there's way less games for Mac, so I'm only interested in old Mac games with high resolution like Prince of Persia, Wolfpack, Lemmings, Comanche 1 CD, which run on oldest G4 single core CPUs having a similar speed to Pentium III. Very interesting CPUs, but wayyy too less apps and games. Same with Linux. That's why DOS and Windows is the key for most games ofc. My real problem is that space isn't infinite and I can't use all desktop towers at the same time, not even collect anything from 30 years. Otherwise I'd have kept like 40 PCs w/ always avg hardware and often 2nd hand, but still good enough. I miss the 486s at most, tbh. It was one of the 1st systems you saw the most speed differences in no time from 486 SX to 5x86 133, any little upgrade offered a quantum leap of new possibilities. 486 66, 80, 100, Am5x86 133...that were the time. Comanche 1-2 and Doom 1-2, Descent, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, AOP, AOE, AOD... The next big thing was the Pentium III for me as we left out Pentium II, then Pentium 4 3+ GHz ofc. or AMD XP 2800+, then several C2D and Core i. Like since 15 years or so we're kinda stuck with CPU speed (free lunch is over for massive single speed performance boosts each year) or let's say the effective CPU speed using new software is like only 50 % more after 10 years now, benchmark speed +100 % in 10 years only, while GPUs still make like +1000 % in 10 years. The real game changers are GPUs and SSDs nowadays. You can game most AAA titles with 10 y/o avg. CPUs by just using a new GPU, SSD, 8+ GB RAM. Well, I love old and new systems and something in between, making modular Frankenstein builds. I have some questions: 1. Will the lower TDP P4 stepping model be slower or is it just a later optimized version like let's say Xeon S771 80 W instead of C2Q 95 W? 2. Have you tried RMclock? It works with P4 hardware and can save some energy when idling. 3. How to run Far Cry 1.4 tent bug fixed with FCAM 1.999? The 2nd newest GOG release did work with it, the latest release doesn't I ran it with original old 1.4 w/o tent bug fixed and with 2nd newest GOG release and it's just awesome, I'd even say a must-have for Far Cry. I also played Delta Sector total conversion back then, but with the tent bug it was insanely hard. If it's installable now with latest tent bug patch, then it would be awesome again. It's a tiny bit like Crysis in the later levels, having some alien drones to shoot at.

I remember buying the P4 Northwood-c 1.8Ghz processor and overclocking it o 2.4Ghz out the box getting a 33% overclock on the CPU and RAMBUS ram to run at 533Mhz (up from 400Mhz). It was stable and had it for many years until the Core 5-2500k was released.

The real trick with Socket 478 is finding the rare mobos with ISA slots and Win98 chipset drivers.

Poland loves you back Phil!!! ❤❤❤

I still have an old gaming PC from 2005 with a Pentium 4 660. It's pretty good, and the 64-bit plus SSE3 means I can run newer stuff on it.

I remember Pentium 4 so fondly. A friend had a hyperthreaded P4 Sony Vaio and it was incredible. The performance was nuts and the build quality superb.

I totally ignored the P4 when it was on the market, but came to appreciate it for retro gaming a few years back when I started watching this channel. Still have the Prescott I built at the time, it's only an AGP Socket 478 but a bit of overclocking (from 3ghz to 3.4) makes it quite decent. A64 is faster per clock but on average the i845 and i865 boards I've used are more reliable and have fewer driver/BIOS quirks than VIA and SiS stuff of the era.

As far as I know some of the later Pentium 4 could run Windows 10 64 bit. It's only Socket 754 and 939 Athlon 64s that miss the instruction.

I grew up with 98 and XP. My first Pc was a Packard Bell that had a pentium 3 and a sound blaster in it and ran 98se. Nowadays my retro pc of choice is an XP machine that has a Q6700 on an Asrock 4coredual sata2, 4gb Corsair XMS2, HD3850 Agp, Audigy 2ZS, and a WD VelociRaptor.

Welp, pentiums 4 are the best retro CPUs, we've determined that previously hah. On another note I actually didn't have a pentium 4 back in the day. You guessed it right, from pentium III I went athlon XP, and athlon64, to finally c2d. Great video!👍

Cedar Mill will even run Windows 10 64bit but probably a bit tooooo slow for everyday use. The updates will bring the system to an hold. Tested Cinebench R23 actually last month and the 661 made 246 Points with only one 2 GiB stick DDR2 667 MT/s. It is probably faster with more RAM in dual channel but it was just for fun. I played Far Cry a lot as well back in the day. Played it through at least 10 times even in the 64 bit version with the even better textures and the latest 32 bit version with HDR. Unfourtnatly there never was an 64 bit HDR version. Remember trying to patch 1.41 on the 64 bit version but it didn't work. It did patch the game but there were graphic glitches everyway and you couldn't interact with doors and other items anymore. And of course I remember the infamous Dam level. That level took at least 10 tries the first time before I reached the vulcano.

I had a 2.53 Ghz P4 back in the day and always thought it was such a strange stock clock speed haha

nothing but a Phils video to make my day. cheers

I have a 631 here, the 65W stepping. I used it in a motherboard that doesn't support Core 2s. Runs reasonably well.

Greetings from Poland! And yeah, Painkiller is great. There is also a Supernatural mod to it, but it is somewhat buggy. IMO it plays better than original other than that though, and has a lot of bonus content.

Ha! Greetings from Poland! :D

Computer components in the early 2000s looked goofy, like they should be decorations in a McDonald's PlayPlace.

im happy you could buy one of them, i have mine sl96h too

When Crysis came out I was about 23 and I'd started to earn some money so I had a Quad Core Q6600 2.4ghz 😮 which for the time was a beast! I had it water cooled. The water cooler leaked and everything was damaged and I never repaired it. This was my last gaming PC as I got divorced soon after and never had the funds to make a "current pc" ever again. I've started building retro PCs now and enjoying these old games again.. Windows 95,98,XP and Vista era.

I still have my 20+ p4 2,8 socket 478 machine. I had to recap it, so now it still work with win XP .🎉

I sold my 661 on Ebay to a buyer in Western Australia about two years ago. Who knows, maybe it's the one in the video!

I've got a couple of these P4s around myself.. one of them is Cedar Mill.. the other is Northwoods I think. They're both usable for sure.. One of them is a NAS on my network right now, running the 32-bit EasyNAS software. Great little file server. The other is an XP machine for my 8 yr old son and it is great for him.

Honestly the performance surprises me a bit, looking good! I'm tempted now, hehe.. I never had a P4 back in the day, I was stuck with a Coppermine system up until I got my E8600, which to date is my favorite PC and my main XP machine. :) Good point on PCIe too, that certainly makes things a lot easier - not to mention cheaper.

I'd love to see some more info on the mainboards towards the end-of-life of the AGP 8x slot. Such as the 775-DUAL-VSTA and its custom BIOS and the asrock alivedual-esata2.

People crap on the p4 and GeForce fx line up but for about 3 years the media including and especially Tech TV(G4) pushed them hard . Most gamers I knew had P4's or athlons and didn't upgrade from the FX lineup until 2006.

Love it or hate it, you guys have to admit that P4 is fun to work with and have some interesting stuff like double pumped ALU.

Pentium 4 is the CPU of the first computer i owned. I remember on XP upgrading the ram how that made the computer really fast. I wish i knew more back then to really get involved in all the great pc games and upgrade the computer myself.

Poland has awesome boss fights? 😮

I always fing these videos interesting, even though I myself completely skipped the whole Netburst era - from Pentium 2 directly to Core 2 duo, lol (yes, I used a Pentium 2 and not even a fast one - 266, as late as end of 2006).

At the time, I was still plugging along with Athlon xp. Pretty sure I landed a Barton xp-m cpu that I inadvertently hit the stock clock of the 3200+ before that was a thing I knew about. Roommate had a prebuilt with an x2 3800+, which eventually upgraded to the Opteron 185. Even though life had us part ways, he donated that build to me, and the cpu became my surviving memento of the absolute bro he is. By the time I could afford to upgrade, I went to a Core 2 setup, and then eventually to a q6600 for the better part of a decade. More recently I had a retro care package that included a board with a Pentium ee 965, so basically 2 core, 4 threads at 3.73ghz. It irks me that the pentium would let me install Windows 10 where I could not on the k8 cpu. Did not make sense at all to me why, especially with how laggy even this flagship Pentium was next to any K8 athlon or Opteron I had to play with. Little wonder it was destroyed by the Phenom II and Core 2 chips.

foxconn support website was shutdown an about 2-3 years ago. I have a few OEM foxconn MB, and this MB are pain. OTOH, their WinFast series are pretty decent and compatible. I dont have a nostalgy with P4, much more with Athlon(XP)/Applebreed(ahh, that overclocking!!!)/Barton, some with AMD K10 family (lots of them) and finally switch to c2d - it was a beast at that time. For todays i'll prefer to build ultimate XP box with dirt cheap E8600+GTX750Ti+SB X-Fi to squeeze out all possible performance and bells and whistles.

I had the Northwood core, the one with 512kb cache and no HT. it was my first PC I build by myself so I do have nostalgia for the P4. However I mostly have AMD CPUs these days. A bunch of Athlon 64s. The only XP computer I have assembled these days though is using modern hardware such as a 3470 and a GTX 750. The old stuff is fun but it’s not super practical and I can’t have a dozen cases and power supplies so most of the motherboards and CPUs are tucked away.

Thanks Phil for another video 👍

I had a Fujitsu Siemen P4 2.6 HT 800!

I still use a PC with a Pentium 4 HT (1C2T; 3.0GHz; Northwood) as backup server with 2 IDE HDDs (3.5"; 250+320GB) and 2 SATA HDDs (2.5"; 2x320GB). It runs FreeBSD 3.1 on OpenZFS, the throughput for the backup (send | ssh receive) is limited to ~200Mbps of 1Gbps due to a 95% load on 1 of the 2 CPU threads. The CPU and motherboard are from a 2003 HP d530 SFF.

IIRC, I only used Pentium 4's at college running Windows 2000 Professional. Nowadays I have several (too many?) P4/P4 HT CPUs and boards, but I opted for a Sempron 2800+/128K/333 and a P4 2.8Ghz/512K/533 for my 98SE/2000 dual-boot retro machines. When I tested a FX5600 and a FX5700LE with 3D Mark, the P4 got lower scores than the Sempron. I was expecting the exact opposite.

The Cedarmill has 2MB cache, and litograph sixti five nm, less hotter than prescott (90nm), and faster because the 2MB cache, and has some features like the presler cores (Pentium D)

I don't have much nostalgia for the Pentium 4. The reason is it feels like it was the most manufactured and available processor of all time. For what I felt like was ten years, every castoff PC I came across or relative's "it's running slow" PC was a Pentium 4. It felt like there was an impossible number of them in the wild long, long after they should have been decommissioned. A large part of this would have been due to the long life of the architecture, being on the market for eight years. There are probably more differences between the Willamette and Cedar Mill Cores than there are between the Pentium Pro and Pentium III.

I had both an Athlon XP and a Pentium D system at the time. Never got a Pentium 4, replaced the Pentium D with a Core 2 relatively quickly. I was really big into Ultima Online, I actually had up to 9 systems running at a time in the early 2000s. Most of them were very junky old systems, though. A lot of my bots were on Pentium II.

Northwood 3.06HT , Prometeia Mach 1 Phase Change , 4.2 Ghz @ -30° of silliness.

If you want a pentium 4 or era equivalent, go for it. Hope you can repair motherboards though. Don't forget the capacitor plague.

People keep saying late P4s were terrible... But do you know what was terrible? The performance of the X2 3800 I bought because of all the P4 naysayers. I would go to the internet cafes, witness the performance of the Prescotts (3,2ghz) in games and be like "Oh god, what I've done?". I quickly upgraded to a X2 5600 which I quickly overclocked and I was ok with it, but the Core 2 Duos were already out so... I ended up ditching it. PD: Also loved my P4-2,4 with 9800pro

This is interesting, since everyone was calling Netburst... Well okay... CrapBurst. But you know... I still find it a little weird that they really wanted to push that Netburst and their RDRAM... Seems like they tried their hardest to make AMD as a much more viable option. I never played Far Cry 1 on 1 Core CPU until Athlon 64, funnily enough. (Although mostly testing the waters of how it works and such, In Multiplayer mode. As a "Listen" server. Or at least that's what Call of Duty 2003 calls that kind of server that ain't LAN or Internet.) I played only on 2 and 4 Threaded CPUs. And I'm curious to beat that game on Athlon 64 one day, because why not. I've built that PC so I could do that. 8:08 A little funfact (Or perhaps not) - I remember that I didn't the fact that in Order to play Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 YOU HAD to run Steam. Like, why? So I couldn't play it on XP anymore? And nobody will remember the days when some of the 2009-2011 titles still ran on Windows XP thanks to Steam killing XP's support? And also now 7's Support? 10:24 Nice to hear that you like my country, that fills me with joy :D I do understand the nostalgia factor for Pentium 4 - When you had it, and had great time with - Great, but personally I never had a Pentium 4. Myself, I went from Socket A into Socket 775 with Core 2 Duo E8500. So I have nostalgia for C2D, but none for Pentium 4, and as a... I guess... "Outsider"? Hard to say... I just picked what is (potentially) more easy to work with and it just was better historically. And also being a Pre-C2D/Athlon 64 X2 Generation, sort of speak. (Athlon 64, Socket 754.) And in terms of how it looked for me with old PCs? Well, I started with Celeron 400 MHz, Socket 370, I only remember playing The Settlers II on it (Which is funny, since it's still for me the best The Settlers Title out there.) then Socket A, Athlon 1100, played games like CMR 2.0, Rally Championship 2000, Ford Racing 2, Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, The Italian Job and Toy Story 2, Windows XP, but the biggest boom happend with C2D E8500, also Windows XP, and games buying craze happend. Need For Speed Most Wanted 2005, The Settlers - Rise of an Rise Empire, All Call of Duty Games from 2003 to 2011, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Far Cry (2004) and that's only a surface of what games I played. And also seeing those games I had on previous PCs working even better on that Core 2 Duo PC was also something special. So yeah, I definitely have some bias towards Socket 775 that I see only the whole Core 2 Duo generation in that. For me Core 2 Duo was my Peak gaming. What's Retro for me? Well... I would say that the games that had Pentium 4/Athlon 64 as their minimum CPU in their system requirements. Newer games than that don't count as Retro for me, since some of those games that require like a Core 2 Duo or Athlon 64 X2 still look modern, I guess a bit "Outdated Modern" But still.

I had a Pentium 4 524 @3.06Ghz!

Netburst was flawed from the beginning, and Intel was just too stubborn to admit it until their P6 cpus (namely the pentium M) began smoking the P4

I hated and continued to hate P4s. My college's computer lab was all P4s, it was like a sauna, and they ran the heat in the room anyway. I have negative nostalgia

It pains me that you call this a retro build :D I bought my first PC in 2006, it wasn't a hand down, it wasn't something my parents bought me. I still own that configuration, it's an ASRock P4i65G with a Pentium 4 CPU, I don't know which one exactly but it has the Hyper-Threading capability. I had to buy this machine because I got serious courses at college that required a stronger PC than I had before (the Celeron 300A build) and I had fond memories with that system. I played a lot of great games I missed out previously or I could play old games on higher graphics. Especially these: Mafia, Unreal Tournament 2k4, No One Lives Forever 2, Doom3, STALKER, Silent Hill 2-3-4, SWAT4, Portal and Half-Life 2. As I said, I still own this system and I go back to it from time to time when I need to test something on a WinXP operating system or I need to do something on a system that still has serial and parallel ports and has a decent speed to do the task.

Personally I never had a Pentium 4 at the time. At first they salted it too much with Rambus, forced them to go back to old SDRAM so we had AMD at the time which with the Athlon was a remarkable success. Even now as I'm building my collection P4 systems give me way more trouble than Core 2 Duos or Pentium 3 (or any older platform for that matter) in terms of crashes and compatibility. I would rather avoid the Pentium 4 and go either older or newer or AMD but YMMV.

Didn't grow up with a Pentium 4 but I did try it a few years back and its capable it seems, but runs quite hot. This seems to be a thing with hardware around the time period mind, the Xbox 360 and PS3 of the same sort of pre-Core2Duo era in particular seem to be no better on that front and seems to have ultimately got worse for them as games started to really push the limits of the hardware in later years. I'd really like to know why things ran so hot at that time.

For me I have no nostalgia for Pentium4 as I was on Athlon64 at that point in time (iirc the 3200+) which was still trucking along fine.

10:20 Zapraszamy :D

Phil i made an XP retro machine based on a 775 board with a core 2 duo but games have issues with two cores. Should i disable 1 core on the Core2Duo or swich it out for a 775 Pentium 4? Can a core2duo with one core keep up with a single core P4?

Netbust 😮

Unfortunately the laws of physics didn't bent to the will of Intel's plan for NetBurst on its way to the 10GHz nirvana.

I skipped P4 completely. i had Athlons and Athlons 64 until Intel released Core2Duo. They were less expensive, cooler and faster.

It’s weirdest platform ever, from 1C/1T CPUs with little to no cache, to Quad Core behemoths with 12MB cache and ECC support.

Yes, Poland is a beautiful country, but the people are **** *😁. Cheers!

Never hás a Pentium 4...went from a Pentium 3-733 to and Athlon XP 2400 to a Core 2 duo to a core5 850 to a xeon and now a ryzen 1600af....

My last Pentium was an i7-4750k, and before that I owned a Pentium 133 MHz. I always had AMD CPUs the rest of the time, so I never bought a Pentium IV. AMD usually offered a slightly better cost to performance ratio at that time, and even today for the most part, imo. Anyhow, thank you for sharing the benchmarks and in-game footage with us. Maybe you could have compared the performance to other CPUs of that era. That would help even more with getting a rough idea of how well the CPU actually performs. Especially for the younger audience who doesn't have any first hand experience with those components, but is still interested in building a retro system from the early 2000s. But apart from that, again, very entertaining as usual :)

broke: get core 2 duo woke: get core i7 3770k

Lemme get this straight... You were flashing the BIOS on motherboards no longer in production and thus dwindling in number, using files from "random" sites no less? Please tell me you at least tried the CPU in the mobo with the BIOS that was already there first before playing russian roulette with computing history my guy, my nerves can't take the stress X'D

For all people defending Pentium 4: if you like use it, but be honest: they suck. Maybe the faster ones are “good” to be usable but, you are using the top-notch cpu made of garbage technology. Maybe you had it back in the day and like it but because you like don’t make them good. Pentium 3, athlons (all) and pentium M were much better cpus at time. Netburst sucked. Its the reallity.

20K on 3D mark 2001 😂. That cpu really sucks. Other day i got more than 18k on athlon xp-m and a x1950pro using an ide hdd and 512mb ddr memory with cl3 (very standatd). This cpu is at least 3 years older that that pentium 4 and using slower ddr1 memory. Pentium 4 really sucks.

He hates Steam so much that he always has to mention how Valve stopped Windows XP support.

It's baffling to me that Intel was so insistent on making NetBurst work for so long. You'd think that the initial failure with Willamette would have raised some red flags, especially when Northwood didn't fix it.

I have had the pentium 4 631 from the same series for 5 years. (3ghz stock, 3,8ghz overklock with stock cooler) Great CPU that ran Windows Vista fine with 4GB of RAM, later Windows 7 and I eventually replaced it in 2011 with a Core2Quad Q6600 that I also had for 5 years. (With the tape mod to increase the multiplier) All this on an Asus P5K motherboard which was also fantastic. Good old times 😀

I agree, I have slowly been building my GoG library, so I do not have to rely on Steam support for an offline retro machine.

I noticed since quite some time ago, they removed 'Windows XP' from the supported OSes on most GOG game pages. If I filter my library of 425 titles, only 10 support XP now. I wonder why they did that...

I was using AMD back then, till Core2 came out.

I have a Willammet P4 system in my collection that was my primary rig for about 5 years and in the early-mid 00s. Had a 9800 Pro in it for a few of those years and played through Far-Cry and GTA SA and some others with no problems. Sadly that 9800 pro died and I moved on to my next machine - I've never gotten around to replacing that 9800 pro with something equivalent. Some day! Maybe :)

I'm 24 and my first pc was with WinXP on AthlonXP 1800+ and Geforce 4 4400 ti. Painkiller is nice game. Greetings from Poland :)

Netburst Nightmares

It is always a delight to watch you videos! I am also a retro enthusiast and I absolutely love your channel. I learn so much and have so much fun ! Thank you so much. You are a wonderful person !

I kick myself for all the hardware I've thrown out over the years, anything from old ISA cards, AT motherboards, and pretty much any 486 and Pentium 1 up through my Q6600 machine. Now I'm on a huge retro kick and spending way too much money on ebay. I've still got my socket 478 machine from' 02 but have expanded to a Northwood 3.06 P4, E8400 C2D, and an A64 3800+ machine. Some with period-correct GPUs, others with more modern cards still compatible with XP. You're spot-on about the prices of AGP cards, I'm glad I still had a few and picked up a few others before prices really took off--I can't find any worth buying that are under $80.

Back then I could not afford a Pentium 4, and I was rocking a Duron. My Duron was a 900 MHz model on a ECS motherboard, with 256 megs of RAM, and combined with a GeForce 2 MX. I used that system until late 2006, then I gave it to my girlfriend (repackaged in a prettier case), and got myself a Sempron 64. Today one of my retro PCs is also a Duron, but 600 MHz. It fits better to a Voodoo 3 card. And has low power consumption for a Socket A CPU.

Yeah nostalgia...I had a pentium 4 3 GHz PC as my main PC even until 2014

125W TDP!. Wow!, That's PressHOT.😂. I had an Athlon XP 2600+ back in the day, paired with an Nvidia 5200FX. Decent for its time. I still have that machine working too.

I remember having a P4 PC back in the day. It was a socket 478 with 256MB RAM and 40GB IDE HDD. Though I had no idea what was the exact model

I missed out on the P4. I had an Athlon XP 2500+ overclocked to be Athlon XP 3200+ back in the day. Then I switched to gaming laptops for the next few years. They had Pentium M, Core 2 Duo and then an Intel i7. I only went back to desktops 4 years ago and went with AMD Ryzen 3800X, which I have since upgraded to 5800X3D. Your channel has encouraged me to get into retro PCs so I now own 5 or 6 P4 motherboard/CPUs. I haven't built a PC with them yet though. My Overkill Win98 PC has a Core 2 Duo X6800 + Geforce 4600, and my XP overkill PC has a 3rd gen i5 + GTX 750 Ti.

I always wanted a Pentium 4 back when they were in the market; I didn't honestly know what was horridly wrong with them until much later. Also, Intel's insistence on the megahertz race at the time caused Crytek to code CryENGINE 2 with Pentium 4s in mind hence why the original Crysis release scaled very poorly on multicore systems even to this day.

i like the lga 775 pentium 4's because many agp lga775 boards only support up to pentium 4, and cedar mill is the best option there.

Very interesting video. That you have mentioned Far Cry is a funny thing. I played it recently on my modern-day pc but it felt wrong on so many levels. I have put it now on the list of the games to play on original hardware as soon as I get my second rig. I already have a Win 98 gaming system (a Pentium 3 800mhz with a Voodoo 3 2000 agp) and for my second rig, I want to have a nice Win XP system. I think the pentium 4 661 would be a very good pick for my system. I had a way weaker pentium 4 with 1.6 GHz back for many years until it was replaced with a Pentium 3 930. then and despite the fact I was not the most powerful p4 out there I had lots of fun with them. So getting a really powerful pentium 4 would be really nice to have.

Happy Friday Phil!

I have the SL9KD Phil and can't wait to put it in a system. What I desperately also want though is the SL9K7:)

I never had a Pentium 4 of any flavor, because they were stupidly overpriced compared to the Athlons and Opterons where I live (New Zealand). They were sometimes over twice the cost for the same level of performance. I had a Duron 600 or 700 MHz, which I was able to unlock to 1 GHz with the famous pencil-mod. It was still terrible due to the lack of cache, but I couldn't afford a proper Athlon back then - the extra ~$100 was a lot for a 13-year-old! When I got enough money a few years later, I just went straight to the Athlon 64, since I had no idea whether my old motherboard with SDR RAM could support the Athlon XPs. I got an Opteron 150, which was the equivalent of the A64 4000+, but at half the price (it was likely a pricing error, but the shop honored the sale anyway.)

Topic Suggestion: Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro. When I first saw 3D acceleration in action, I had to get one of those 3D cards as well. And it seemed like the Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro was a All in One Card with 3D Acceeration. But then I got disappointed quickly and suspected that the cards was broke, until I realized it's just not great. So I ended up buying a Voodoo 2 Accelerator on top. The Card is probably not very attractive for building a retro PC now, but I think its kinda interesting as it basically "evades" the common eye. Like when I looked first back at it I felt like "so what the hell was that thing even based on?" There is also no coverage of that specific card on yt and only very few videos on the 3Dlabs Permedia 2.

I had a scrapyard Pentium III for the longest time, my Dad found a system in a dumpster -- he couldn't afford any real PC parts and didn't know where to get them at the time until later down the years. No graphics card, no thermal paste. It was all bare bones. If I had to go back to the Pentium III system for a project, I'd give it the best parts possible with both Windows 98SE and XP in mind. Vista and even 7 was there too as a main operating system for that system, but sooner or later, it crapped out. But with a Pentium 4, I'd prefer to go all out, though I have no nostalgia for it. Same goes for the E8600 Core 2 Duo, since it has the best single core performance -- coupling that with any top tier and stable experimentally supported GPU on real hardware, I'd say you can't get any better than that performance wise. Hopefully the experience with multi-booting Windows 98SE and XP would be a solid one, I've never seen anyone use experimental drivers to get a Nvidia Geforce 8800 working. I may give a crack at it when I do build a overpowered PCI-E based Retro PC.

I have a machine with a Pentium 4 631 (same thing as the 661, just 3.0 GHz instead of 3.6). I wanted to put Windows 98 on it but this hardware is a little too new. My motherboard has Intel 955X chipset which is only supported on Windows 2000 or newer.

I think having 2 cores might also introduce new problems. If I remember correctly Starcraft 2 needed a patch otherwise the scrolling would bug out with more than one core. But not every game is fortunate enough to get supported that long, so I guess there are also several games which just wont work on multi-core CPUs properly anymore. I am not sure if you could easily disable additional cores on all models, but then also the P4 performance might be better. My first Multicore CPU was a Phenom II X3 720, which I probably only remember because it was weird to have a 3 core CPU. I dont remember what I had right before that, just that it wasn't an Intel. That said, around year 2005 or so, the crazy hardware race was also kinda over and progress began to slow down. On top of that MMOs became a thing I spent lots of time with, so up-to-date hardware became less and less important, and with that also my connection to it.

Never owned a p4 for my main PC, it was always Athlon during them times, But I have gotten a few P4's to work on and I was never impressed with them to ever consider the switch, usually ended up giving them away if I was able to get a system with one.

Northwood wasn't all too bad for me personally but Willamette and Prescott were terrible; those 2 cores were inefficient and especially with Willamette, you'd likely be using RDRAM which absolutely SUCKED. Imagine boasting about higher memory bandwidth but your address bus is 8/16/32-bit compared to 64-bit for PC133 SDRAM... not to mention PC2100 DDR runs faster than PC800 and probably even PC1066. I have a 3.2GHz northwood P4HT system that runs 98SE and 2000 SP4 beautifully. Might consider upgrading to XP from 2000 since it supports HT more efficiently from what I've heard. I had an old Presario desktop with a Pentium III board using a VIA chipset and I wanted to upgrade to a faster platform for my CD/tape ripping machine. I also use that machine for older programs and games that absolutely fly on a northwood system with a radeon 9800. Cedar mill was fine and it solved a lot of issues that prescott had with power consumption but it still used the same 31-stage pipeline so it wasn't a huge improvement over Prescott and Prescott 2M (CM was a die-shrink of the latter). Sucks that Intel didn't support Cedar Mill on 915 boards though, my Pavilion zd8000 could really benefit from a Cedar Mill.

Great Retro nostalgia Phil. My first Pentium 4 was the Northwood 3.0ghz with Intel's excellent 800 fsb. I had the ATI 9600XT and 1 gig of ram. My last P4 (still have) is the Emachines P4 641 @3.2ghz with 4 gigs of ddr 2 ram and 550ti from Nvidia. I still have my XFX GTS 8800 320 as well. Using a 32bit Windows 7 OS. I love going back to play my old games and some Pinball with my PS2 keyboard. Pain Killer is an awesome shoot em' up game as well! Cheers!

man i had a intel 3.4ghz prescott Socket 478 back in the day lol i remaber play Wolrd of warcraft on that with a Nvidia 7800 GT AGP.. after then i upgraded to a Core 2 Quad and a 8800 GTS 320mg i though i was king of the hill back then hahaha