It's almost as awesome as my Gateway P4 1.5 GHz Willamette on 845 w/ SDRAM PC133!!!!

I treasure the classic sluggishness of the Willamette. Combine it with SDRAM and you have pure gold. 😉

swaaye wrote:

It's almost as awesome as my Gateway P4 1.5 GHz Willamette on 845 w/ SDRAM PC133!!!!

I treasure the classic sluggishness of the Willamette. Combine it with SDRAM and you have pure gold. 😉

hehe, can imagine the sluggishness

But this i850E machine is quite snappy....even does 720p youtube vid's and full screen but not all of them 😜

Would it be possible to fit a Prescott in it?

Svenne wrote:

Would it be possible to fit a Prescott in it?

Nope, the prescott is a 800mhz fsb CPU, the i850 chipset only takes 533mhz fsb cpu's..

I found the same thing about P4's, they always seem much more sluggish then they should be in theory. On top of that they consume a LOT of electricity.
Back when P4's were state of the art I was always in denial when I read on a forum about some overclocker-type guy proudly posting pics of his LED-enhanced P4 main rig.
I never liked P4's, I'd rather have a P3, those were great cpu's for their time.

P4's to me are stuff I give away to someone who needs a computer and has no money.

swaaye wrote:

I am getting a hand-me-down Dell P4 myself sometime this month. I think it's on a late model 845 with PC2700. Could be 865. I've […]
Show full quote

I am getting a hand-me-down Dell P4 myself sometime this month. I think it's on a late model 845 with PC2700. Could be 865. I've worked on it before but I can't remember exactly what's inside.

It always amazes me how they feel so sluggish with their high clock speeds. When I sit down at a P4, I always think about other CPUs at their clock speed and of course P4 doesn't compare at all to chips like Pentium M, Athlon 64 or Athlon XP at the same clock.

I was reading about the fascinating trace cache that P4 uses the other day and found an interesting comparison between it and Core i7/Core 2's "Loop Stream Detector".

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?Article … 40208182719&p=5

One of the most interesting things to note about Nehalem is that the LSD is conceptually very similar to a trace cache. The goal of the trace cache was to store decoded uops in dynamic program order, instead of the static compiler ordered x86 instructions stored in the instruction cache, thereby removing the decoder and branch predictor from the critical path and enabling multiple basic blocks to be fetched at once. The problem with the trace cache in the P4 was that it was extremely fragile; when the trace cache missed, it would decode instructions one by one. The hit rate for a normal instruction cache is well above 90%. The trace cache hit rate was extraordinarily low by those standards, rarely exceeding 80% and easily getting as low as 50-60%. In other words, 40-50% of the time, the P4 was behaving exactly like a single issue microprocessor, rather than taking full advantage of it's execution resources. The LSD buffer achieves almost all the same goals as a trace cache, and when it doesn’t work (i.e. the loop is too big) there are no extremely painful downsides as there were with the P4's trace cache.

P4 sucks. 40-50% of the time it's not much better architecturally than a 486. 😁 I've been wondering how Atom and P4 compare at the same clock speeds. They are probably pretty close and that is really ugly for P4 from a power efficiency standpoint!

Sounds like a Dimension 4550 or 8300?

Agree about the sluggishness....but the s478 Extreme P4 3.4ghz I have in my Abit IC7 mobo is something else, the 2mb L3 cache helps alot especially in demanding games but it runs hot as hell 😜

I never had a P4. I had basically every Intel CPU generation before and after it, but I skipped the P4. I returned with the Pentium M, which one can either see as the deluxe P3 or the budget CoreDuo. But the P4 never convinced me to buy it. My only AMD CPUs bought at retail prices were Athlons.

Nope, the prescott is a 800mhz fsb CPU, the i850 chipset only takes 533mhz fsb cpu's.

Actually, there were a bunch of 533fsb Pres-hots, but they still won't work in that machine. It requires both BIOS support and some sort of low-level hardware changes as well, though I don't know the exact details. But I think most of the 533fsb ones were <3ghz anyhow (and slightly slower than Northwood, clock for clock), so you wouldn't really gain anything even if it did work.

swaaye wrote:

Yeah I imagine that particular P4 is quite decent, except for the ridiculous heat. Might not want to compare it to today's lowly Celeron 440/450 though. 😁

My parents have a Dimension 4550 actually. That one is a P4 2.66/533 on 845 with PC2700.

I think that the box my coworker is going to give me is a 4600. That runs 865. That seems likely to me. 8300 runs 875 and must have been pricey in its time.

The Dell's from this era are pretty decent..they used good components back then
We've used Dell pc's at work during the past ten years and the machines from 2005 and earlier runs 24/7 but the newer one's (Dimension's, Optiplex) have ran into alot of hw related troubles...dead PSU''s....crashed hdd's etc

I think the last hq Dell Dimension model is the 8400 which use the same chassis as the rest of the 4000/8000 series but it has s775 and PCI express chipset + ddr2 technology

Amigaz wrote:

The Dell's from this era are pretty decent..they used good components back then

I fully agree. I've got a Precision 350 with a 2ghz P4, 1gb rdram. Even though it's slow, it's a damn stable machine with real good build quality. I think when most people knock Dell's, it's mostly cause of bad experiences with their budget line-up -which like most things cheap, can't be good.

I used a Dell Optiplex with a 2 GHz Northwood and 768 MB of Rambus at my last job, and it was pretty underwhelming. The performance wasn't bad for everyday tasks, but some of the newer apps my office used just CHURNED - ArcGIS, in particular, was close to unbearable. Good job on the build, though - even now a 3 GHz box with hyperthreading and a decent video card can do an awful lot.

If you want to talk about power consumption, come over some time with hot dogs and marshmallows, and gather around my Pentium D 820 - dual 90 nm Prescotts, squeezed into a single CPU package. We can tell each other ghost stories, or let it run as a dedicated server for Left 4 Dead. :3 For all of that, it's still a sight better than the Pentium D Extreme Edition, with its de facto 160+W TDP... I knew someone who paired one of those with a Radeon 2900XT, and he literally bored out the side of his case to install a fan that pushed 240 cubic feet per minute of air through it. It was a screamer at the time, and damned loud, but he eventually parted it out - that kind of heat is profoundly unwelcome in Texas.

Concupiscence wrote:

I used a Dell Optiplex with a 2 GHz Northwood and 768 MB of Rambus at my last job, and it was pretty underwhelming. The performance wasn't bad for everyday tasks, but some of the newer apps my office used just CHURNED - ArcGIS, in particular, was close to unbearable. Good job on the build, though - even now a 3 GHz box with hyperthreading and a decent video card can do an awful lot.

If you want to talk about power consumption, come over some time with hot dogs and marshmallows, and gather around my Pentium D 820 - dual 90 nm Prescotts, squeezed into a single CPU package. We can tell each other ghost stories, or let it run as a dedicated server for Left 4 Dead. :3 For all of that, it's still a sight better than the Pentium D Extreme Edition, with its de facto 160+W TDP... I knew someone who paired one of those with a Radeon 2900XT, and he literally bored out the side of his case to install a fan that pushed 240 cubic feet per minute of air through it. It was a screamer at the time, and damned loud, but he eventually parted it out - that kind of heat is profoundly unwelcome in Texas.

lolol, that D 820 machine would have been welcome during the extremely cold winter we had here 😁

It is really remarkable how poor the per-clock performance is without hyperthreading. I don't regret the purchase - $45 for a dual-core CPU with heatsink/fan and an Intel D945PSN ATX motherboard was a hell of a deal, and it's been a very solid, reliable system. But there's no small performance delta between it and my Athlon X2 5050e, a CPU that runs 200 MHz slower yet emits less than half the heat and manages to be more than 2/3 faster in some benchmarks... The 820's only real vindication is in video encoding, where it manages to be vaguely competitive. If it didn't run so miserably hot, it could be fine for an HTPC.

Incidentally, that 240 cfm fan had steel fins and spun with such force that it could snap a pencil in half without slowing down. It would also hover in place if placed upside down on a flat surface. 😀

How's it going with the Rambus box?

swaaye wrote:

How's it going with the Rambus box?

Well, have installed some games in both the Win98 and WinXP enviroment 😀

Next step is to make Win98SE boot into pure DOS with mouse, cd-rom and sound support with the TB Santa Cruz

I'll post some screenshots later

Next hardware change will be to upgrade the RAM with two 512mb 1066mhz rdram sticks because the max RAM with 1066 sticks is 1,5gig

Looking for a DVD burner also to replace the (dying) DVD-ROM

For me, the funny thing about the NetBurst line (Pentium 4 through Pentium D,) is just how insanely inefficient (per clock cycle) they really were.

I got a Core Duo (2.0 GHz, 667 MHz bus,) notebook when they first came out. I then got handed down to me a Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (Basically a dual-core Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading, 1066 MHz bus, nominally 3.73 GHz.) I overclocked the PEE to 4.0 GHz, making it exactly double the Core Duo in GHz rating. With a 60% faster FSB. In nearly every benchmark I threw at them, the notebook scored higher on CPU tests. Insane. I ended up replacing the PEE with a "Pentium Dual-Core" chip (Basically a cut down Core 2 Duo,) at 2.0 GHz, and it spanked the PEE on the rest of the benchmarks. (In addition to lowering the total system power usage so much that the PEE on idle used more power than the Pentium Dual Core did at full load.)

The system I really want is a dual Tualatin P3, i840 chipset board. dual-channel RAMBUS with dual 1.4 GHz Tualatins. That would be faster than even the i850E 3.0 GHz P4 system for almost every use. Unfortunately, the only RAMBUS I have are four 64 MB sticks. Unfortunately, I can't find ANY dual socket 370-native i840 boards, which means a dual slot-1 with dual Tualatin slotkets. Not cheap.

Yeah there were two reasons that I never bought a P4. 1) Price was higher than AMD 2) P4 is not clearly superior.

P4 was a strange and fascinating beast though. Semiconductor physics were against it unfortunately. But if you have an app that can be turned into a lot of SSE2, P4 could be a speedy chip for sure. The clock speed will pay off in that case. Or if you wanted to move a lot of data, it had superior cache and memory performance. Athlon XP wasn't that great compared to it once we got into the Northwood era. At the end, Athlon XP was definitely the slower CPU. HT was nifty too and brought a tangible improvement to system responsiveness.

But....the heat! That's the physics problem right there.

Pentium M and Core Duo were great chips. Because they were only notebook chips I noticed that not many people realized that a ~20W Dothan P-M was essentially Athlon 64's equal per clock. They can't clock as high as A64 though.

Amigaz, I think you should change the thread title to something like "P4 HQ" or some such. 😀

@swaaye

Nice score 😀

How come you didn't put in a beefier graphics card?

I have to do something about the CPU fan on my system....it almost sounds like my system is about to do a take off when I stress the CPU 😜

Anonymous Freak wrote:

For me, the funny thing about the NetBurst line (Pentium 4 through Pentium D,) is just how insanely inefficient (per clock cycle) they really were.

I got a Core Duo (2.0 GHz, 667 MHz bus,) notebook when they first came out. I then got handed down to me a Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (Basically a dual-core Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading, 1066 MHz bus, nominally 3.73 GHz.) I overclocked the PEE to 4.0 GHz, making it exactly double the Core Duo in GHz rating. With a 60% faster FSB. In nearly every benchmark I threw at them, the notebook scored higher on CPU tests. Insane. I ended up replacing the PEE with a "Pentium Dual-Core" chip (Basically a cut down Core 2 Duo,) at 2.0 GHz, and it spanked the PEE on the rest of the benchmarks. (In addition to lowering the total system power usage so much that the PEE on idle used more power than the Pentium Dual Core did at full load.)

The system I really want is a dual Tualatin P3, i840 chipset board. dual-channel RAMBUS with dual 1.4 GHz Tualatins. That would be faster than even the i850E 3.0 GHz P4 system for almost every use. Unfortunately, the only RAMBUS I have are four 64 MB sticks. Unfortunately, I can't find ANY dual socket 370-native i840 boards, which means a dual slot-1 with dual Tualatin slotkets. Not cheap.

Would also like to get my hands on an i840 system with Tualatin support.

I have two more RAMBUS systems..one is actually an i840 system...a Dell Precision 640 which cost ~9000 when it was new but it only takes Xeon (Coppermine) up to 933mhz 😜
The other RAMBUS system is a Dell Precision 220 which has the i820 chipset and has dual 1ghz Coppermine slot 1 cpu's...this machine feels really snappy 😀