What GPU you want to combine with the P4?

be quiet! Straight Power 11 650W ATX 2.4
Combined 3.3V & 5V : 140W
Combined all four 12V rails : 649.2W

5w rail only: 120W
12V1 rail only: 216W

Do you want to run a 6800 Ultra?

For example, i am running a P4 2800 Mhz northwood and Geforce 4 Ti with Enermax 330W PSU:
5V rail: 32A , 160W
12V rail: 122A , 144W

melbar wrote on 2024-04-27, 10:55:

Do you want to run a 6800 Ultra? […]
Show full quote

Do you want to run a 6800 Ultra?

For example, i am running a P4 2800 Mhz northwood and Geforce 4 Ti with only an Enermax 330W PSU:
5V rail: 32A , 160W
12V rail: 122A , 144W

I'm just going to put the specs here:

Pentium 4 1.7GHz Willamette (socket 478)
Sound blaster live
Nvidia Geforce4 TI (4200 x8/ 4200 / 4400, I'm thinking of using one of these or a Geforce3 TI card)
512 MB DDR 266 MHz/PC2100
DVD/CD Drive
Floppy disk drive

These are the specs I'm going to have for the PC I'm building

eyalk4568 wrote on 2024-04-27, 11:33:

I'm just going to put the specs here: […]
Show full quote

melbar wrote on 2024-04-27, 10:55:

Do you want to run a 6800 Ultra? […]
Show full quote

Do you want to run a 6800 Ultra?

For example, i am running a P4 2800 Mhz northwood and Geforce 4 Ti with only an Enermax 330W PSU:
5V rail: 32A , 160W
12V rail: 122A , 144W

I'm just going to put the specs here:

Pentium 4 1.7GHz Willamette (socket 478)
Sound blaster live
Nvidia Geforce4 TI (4200 x8/ 4200 / 4400, I'm thinking of using one of these or a Geforce3 TI card)
512 MB DDR 266 MHz/PC2100
DVD/CD Drive
Floppy disk drive

These are the specs I'm going to have for the PC I'm building

I had a Willamette (1.9) back in the day, complete with RDRAM, and was happy enough with it, but I'm a bit curious - why pick a Willamette for a retro system?

GeForce 3 (and a SoundBlaster Audigy 1) would be the most period correct. The GeForce 4 is more a 2002 card that should go with a Northwood...

no problem with multi rail , but 5V might e a problem if board doesnt have 12V power connector, did all P4s have one?

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-04-27, 14:09:

no problem with multi rail , but 5V might e a problem if board doesnt have 12V power connector, did all P4s have one?

All Pentium 4 motherboards have a 12V connector, only Athlon had the problems with the 5V as a lot if not most motherboards for Athlon XP didn't have the 4 pin connector and required a high 5V rail.

VivienM wrote on 2024-04-27, 13:46:

eyalk4568 wrote on 2024-04-27, 11:33:

I'm just going to put the specs here: […]
Show full quote

melbar wrote on 2024-04-27, 10:55:

Do you want to run a 6800 Ultra? […]
Show full quote

Do you want to run a 6800 Ultra?

For example, i am running a P4 2800 Mhz northwood and Geforce 4 Ti with only an Enermax 330W PSU:
5V rail: 32A , 160W
12V rail: 122A , 144W

I'm just going to put the specs here:

Pentium 4 1.7GHz Willamette (socket 478)
Sound blaster live
Nvidia Geforce4 TI (4200 x8/ 4200 / 4400, I'm thinking of using one of these or a Geforce3 TI card)
512 MB DDR 266 MHz/PC2100
DVD/CD Drive
Floppy disk drive

These are the specs I'm going to have for the PC I'm building

I had a Willamette (1.9) back in the day, complete with RDRAM, and was happy enough with it, but I'm a bit curious - why pick a Willamette for a retro system?

GeForce 3 (and a SoundBlaster Audigy 1) would be the most period correct. The GeForce 4 is more a 2002 card that should go with a Northwood...

Its a new old stock socket 478 Pentium 4 so I thought I would pick it up, I wanted to try and build a retro pc with mostly new old stock parts and I though that if its for socket 478 then it wont require any high 5V rail. also the games I'm going to play on this PC are from 2002 or earlier so I don't think they will require any better CPU for it.
But your question does make me curious, are there any problems with a Pentium 4 Willamette for a retro PC?

Your performance level is in worst case on a level of 1,33GHz to 1,4Ghz Thunderbird, or best case on a level of 1500+ or 1600+ Palomino CPU

eyalk4568 wrote on 2024-04-27, 15:12:

Its a new old stock socket 478 Pentium 4 so I thought I would pick it up, I wanted to try and build a retro pc with mostly new old stock parts and I though that if its for socket 478 then it wont require any high 5V rail. also the games I'm going to play on this PC are from 2002 or earlier so I don't think they will require any better CPU for it.
But your question does make me curious, are there any problems with a Pentium 4 Willamette for a retro PC?

I don't think there's any problems per se, but...
1. The Willamette's performance was very meh for the time. This is one of three main periods in history when AMD had much better performance than Intel - the second is ~2005-6 before the launch of Conroe, the third is, well, now. If you were an enthusiast not scared of temperamental VIA chipsets, you were getting an Athlon.
2. It was followed by the much-higher regarded Northwood that upped the clock speeds quite quickly. Within a year of me building my 1.9 Willamette (Dec. 2001), I think they had Northwoods at 3.06GHz. Those high-clocked late-2002 Northwoods got enthusiasts back on the Intel side for a couple of years.
3. Memory/chipsets. The Willamette was supposed to be paired with RDRAM in the i850 chipset. Pricy although there was a brief window of time in 2002-3ish where i850E/Northwoods were half-affordable. Then Intel launched an SDRAM chipset for the P4, which had bad performance... at a time where the VIA chipsets for Athlons had already moved to DDR. Then there was a variant of the i845 with DDR support later.
The P4 platform really put its memory issues behind it only with the launch of the i865 and DDR. And I think 'officially' you're not supposed to be able to run Willamettes on most i865 boards...
4. Lurking in the background was the Pentium III, especially the Tualatin flavours, which had roughishly comparable performance. And didn't require mad cooling. The world of late 2001 was... not well-suited... for cooling the much-hotter-running Willamettes. But they had other limitations, e.g. I think the Intel chipsets for Tualatin only went up to 512 megs of RAM. 512 megs of RAM was... insane... for a ~1999-2000 Win98SE machine, but you're starting to get into the XP era now. And XP (just like every other flavour of NT) loves RAM.

I had a Willamette from Dec. 2001 until getting a Conroe E6600 at launch in mid-2006 and I liked it, but the Willamette (especially with RDRAM) was really the Intel fanboy's choice.

So that's sort of the thing... there's nothing really wrong with a Willamette, but there isn't really anything 'right' about it that makes it a particularly desirable platform, either back in the day or as a retro platform. I suspect some would argue for retro purposes you really want a high-powered 440BX P3 setup that can have an ISA sound card (and therefore look back at the DOS era more), or you might as well skip all the way to the C2Ds for a retro XP rig. I am assuming you were aiming for Win98?

eyalk4568 wrote on 2024-04-27, 15:06:

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-04-27, 14:09:

no problem with multi rail , but 5V might e a problem if board doesnt have 12V power connector, did all P4s have one?

All Pentium 4 motherboards have a 12V connector

This is not true as a general statement, for example: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/ecs-p4vxad-plus-1-0
Or: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m902-v3.0

VivienM wrote on 2024-04-27, 18:21:

I don't think there's any problems per se, but... 1. The Willamette's performance was very meh for the time. This is one of thr […]
Show full quote

eyalk4568 wrote on 2024-04-27, 15:12:

Its a new old stock socket 478 Pentium 4 so I thought I would pick it up, I wanted to try and build a retro pc with mostly new old stock parts and I though that if its for socket 478 then it wont require any high 5V rail. also the games I'm going to play on this PC are from 2002 or earlier so I don't think they will require any better CPU for it.
But your question does make me curious, are there any problems with a Pentium 4 Willamette for a retro PC?

I don't think there's any problems per se, but...
1. The Willamette's performance was very meh for the time. This is one of three main periods in history when AMD had much better performance than Intel - the second is ~2005-6 before the launch of Conroe, the third is, well, now. If you were an enthusiast not scared of temperamental VIA chipsets, you were getting an Athlon.
2. It was followed by the much-higher regarded Northwood that upped the clock speeds quite quickly. Within a year of me building my 1.9 Willamette (Dec. 2001), I think they had Northwoods at 3.06GHz. Those high-clocked late-2002 Northwoods got enthusiasts back on the Intel side for a couple of years.
3. Memory/chipsets. The Willamette was supposed to be paired with RDRAM in the i850 chipset. Pricy although there was a brief window of time in 2002-3ish where i850E/Northwoods were half-affordable. Then Intel launched an SDRAM chipset for the P4, which had bad performance... at a time where the VIA chipsets for Athlons had already moved to DDR. Then there was a variant of the i845 with DDR support later.
The P4 platform really put its memory issues behind it only with the launch of the i865 and DDR. And I think 'officially' you're not supposed to be able to run Willamettes on most i865 boards...
4. Lurking in the background was the Pentium III, especially the Tualatin flavours, which had roughishly comparable performance. And didn't require mad cooling. The world of late 2001 was... not well-suited... for cooling the much-hotter-running Willamettes. But they had other limitations, e.g. I think the Intel chipsets for Tualatin only went up to 512 megs of RAM. 512 megs of RAM was... insane... for a ~1999-2000 Win98SE machine, but you're starting to get into the XP era now. And XP (just like every other flavour of NT) loves RAM.

I had a Willamette from Dec. 2001 until getting a Conroe E6600 at launch in mid-2006 and I liked it, but the Willamette (especially with RDRAM) was really the Intel fanboy's choice.

So that's sort of the thing... there's nothing really wrong with a Willamette, but there isn't really anything 'right' about it that makes it a particularly desirable platform, either back in the day or as a retro platform. I suspect some would argue for retro purposes you really want a high-powered 440BX P3 setup that can have an ISA sound card (and therefore look back at the DOS era more), or you might as well skip all the way to the C2Ds for a retro XP rig. I am assuming you were aiming for Win98?

Yea, I'm aiming for a windows 98 PC, although all the points you gave are legitimate, would you say a Pentium 4 1.7 Willamette PC with DDR 266 RAM and a geforce3 TI 200 would be sufficient for an above 60 FPS gaming for games from around 2001 and before that, or should I upgrade some of the specs for better performance like the CPU or GPU?

watson wrote on 2024-04-27, 19:26:

eyalk4568 wrote on 2024-04-27, 15:06:

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-04-27, 14:09:

no problem with multi rail , but 5V might e a problem if board doesnt have 12V power connector, did all P4s have one?

All Pentium 4 motherboards have a 12V connector

This is not true as a general statement, for example: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/ecs-p4vxad-plus-1-0
Or: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m902-v3.0

That is the first time I saw any socket 478 motherboard without the 4 pin connector, so that's good to know.

melbar wrote on 2024-04-27, 17:21:

Your performance level is in worst case on a level of 1,33GHz to 1,4Ghz Thunderbird, or best case on a level of 1500+ or 1600+ Palomino CPU

Q3arena.png

UT2003.png

Do these charts show FPS ?

eyalk4568 wrote on 2024-04-28, 08:10:

Do these charts show FPS ?

yes, and clearly 130-200 fps means your CPU sucks and you should feel bad ;P Seriously tho no idea what melbar meant, Its not like its a Willamette Celeron, your cpu is fine.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-04-28, 10:55:

eyalk4568 wrote on 2024-04-28, 08:10:

Do these charts show FPS ?

yes, and clearly 130-200 fps means your CPU sucks and you should feel bad ;P Seriously tho no idea what melbar meant, Its not like its a Willamette Celeron, your cpu is fine.

Wait they created Willamette Celerons? I didn't know that 🤣

eyalk4568 wrote on 2024-04-28, 08:02:

Yea, I'm aiming for a windows 98 PC, although all the points you gave are legitimate, would you say a Pentium 4 1.7 Willamette PC with DDR 266 RAM and a geforce3 TI 200 would be sufficient for an above 60 FPS gaming for games from around 2001 and before that, or should I upgrade some of the specs for better performance like the CPU or GPU?

At what resolutions?

I was playing games at 1600x1200 (I was lucky and got a 20" 1600x1200 LCD in late 2001...) on my 1.9 Willamette back in the day, first with a GF3 Ti500 then when that died, an ATI 9800 Pro. Gaming on those was acceptable though I suspect serious gamers would disagree. Those cards would have screamed at 1024x768 I suspect.

This was an era where people with CRTs, in particular, would regularly game at a lower resolution than what they used for their Windows desktops.

Also, note that some games from that era were not 3D accelerated, particularly strategy games (e.g. AoE 2, Civ III). That being said... why you'd want to play CivIII on retro hardware is a good question... I'm pretty sure the Steam version runs great on modern hardware and late game can definitely benefit from any additional CPU horsepower you can throw at it...

Realistically, I think you'll be fine. My suggestion - if you don't have one already, start planning for an XP retro rig as well. Anything from 2002ish that might struggle a bit on your 98SE Willamette at higher resolutions, just play on your XP rig and it should scream. And right now is a great time for XP retro rigs - there's tons of late-era XP hardware (sandy bridges, ivy bridges, stuff from a bit earlier, GTX 7xx cards, etc) very affordably available everywhere.

You should be fine pre 2001 with 1.7 Willamette, DDR 266, GeForce3 Ti200, and that PSU. Looking briefly a single 12 V rail might even be enough of the 4, depending on what else is going in, and the 5 V at 24 A is fine.

I build Barton rigs for 2003 or less, XP or 98, and Core 2 Quad for above, though XP is supported on much later. I do use GTX 950 / 960 cards now for XP.

I have Athlon XP 1800+ with 9200 SE here, which is similar enough to your picks, and its fine for 2001 and before. Everyone says 5 V 35 A for Athlon XP, but quality 30 A always worked then and now for me.

VivienM wrote on 2024-04-28, 13:02:

At what resolutions? […]
Show full quote

eyalk4568 wrote on 2024-04-28, 08:02:

Yea, I'm aiming for a windows 98 PC, although all the points you gave are legitimate, would you say a Pentium 4 1.7 Willamette PC with DDR 266 RAM and a geforce3 TI 200 would be sufficient for an above 60 FPS gaming for games from around 2001 and before that, or should I upgrade some of the specs for better performance like the CPU or GPU?

At what resolutions?

I was playing games at 1600x1200 (I was lucky and got a 20" 1600x1200 LCD in late 2001...) on my 1.9 Willamette back in the day, first with a GF3 Ti500 then when that died, an ATI 9800 Pro. Gaming on those was acceptable though I suspect serious gamers would disagree. Those cards would have screamed at 1024x768 I suspect.

This was an era where people with CRTs, in particular, would regularly game at a lower resolution than what they used for their Windows desktops.

Also, note that some games from that era were not 3D accelerated, particularly strategy games (e.g. AoE 2, Civ III). That being said... why you'd want to play CivIII on retro hardware is a good question... I'm pretty sure the Steam version runs great on modern hardware and late game can definitely benefit from any additional CPU horsepower you can throw at it...

Realistically, I think you'll be fine. My suggestion - if you don't have one already, start planning for an XP retro rig as well. Anything from 2002ish that might struggle a bit on your 98SE Willamette at higher resolutions, just play on your XP rig and it should scream. And right now is a great time for XP retro rigs - there's tons of late-era XP hardware (sandy bridges, ivy bridges, stuff from a bit earlier, GTX 7xx cards, etc) very affordably available everywhere.

I'm going to play on 1024x768, 800x600 and 640x480, also what did you mean by "Those cards would have screamed at 1024x768"?

eyalk4568 wrote on 2024-04-28, 16:01:

I'm going to play on 1024x768, 800x600 and 640x480, also what did you mean by "Those cards would have screamed at 1024x768"?

Okay, then the GF3 Ti200 will be plenty.

By 'screamed', I meant... perform very well. Look at Anandtech's review - they're getting over 100 FPS in Unreal Tournament at 1024x768 on the GF3s. https://www.anandtech.com/show/831/10 And Quake 3 Arena, same thing, huge FPS at 1024x768 on any of the GF3s. https://www.anandtech.com/show/831/7

Note, however, how things get different when you are looking at 1600x1200. Now you have a huge gap in performance between, say, the Ti200 and Ti500.