Good idea, this topic! 😁

I've never been a fan of Netburst myself, but after having read some of the other views here (yours included 😜) I'm tempted to give it a try. Though I'm most likely gonna stick with Northwood (I'm evading Preshot as if it's hot coal 😜).
I've found P3's to be very solid, both in stability and in speed, it was a very good platform with little problems on the Intel side of boards. VIA made some interesting chipsets for P3 (and for P4 also, it made a s423 DDR board) but was let down by all kinds of nasty issues. VIA did give the P3 platform some very interesting options though, like >512MB RAM and DDR.
s370 P3's generally already come with AGP 4x and ATA-100 though and many of the first gen P4 chipsets were actually using SDRAM.

Netburst was interesting in a way but the stock Intel coolers I find to be noisy and it's not easy replacing it's fan with a 3rd party fan as the fan is part of the mounting mechanism...way to go Intel 🙁

Personally I really like the post-s370 AMD solutions but they come with problems if their own

I agree it's better to stick to Northwoods rather than Prescotts. I keep worrying about my motherboards lifespan with the Prescott installed- and since I do like this board quite a bit will swap out the Pressie for a NW 3ghz chip soonest I can.

Maybe why I find s423/ 478 to be so interesting at the moment is that I've had/ have tons of s370/ slot 1 rigs over the years and done pretty much everything there is to do with them. So its Netburst time, baby!

Here, some reviews from the cusp of P4 going mainstream. Ten years ago...enjoy!

Sept '01- Intel 845 motherboard roundup (SDram). The Asus P4B got to 170mhz fsb! Fabulous.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/826

Dec'01- VIA P4X266 (DDR) motherboard review. i845 SDram systems really lag behind, as expected . Intels 850 chipset easily leads all.
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/p4x266comp/default.asp

Then the superb SiS645 comes along and equalizes the game-paving the way for DDR P4 systems to be de rigueur.
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/sis645/default.asp

Some benchmarks for D850, 845, VIA P4X266 and Athlon 1.4ghz- The 2ghz P4 leads most benchmarks when matched with the 850 or P4X266 motherboards. 845 really sucks- a 2.0 on it is slower than even a 1.7ghz on a DDR/ RDRAM board.
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/pentium42ghz/

sgt76 wrote:

First point for discussion- I find it pretty strange that most retro builders stick to P3/ Athlon builds for circa 2000-2002 machines. Given that the original s423 was launched in Nov 2000 and ran until Jul'01 and the Willamette s478s were out in Aug 01, that makes them congruent with the same timeframe as the much loved Tually and Athlon builds.

sgt76 wrote:

From a devil's advocate perspective, early P4 systems have some advantages over comparable P3 and Athlon systems- but especially over the P3s- larger ram support (up to 2gb), better memory bandwidth performance, better gaming benchmarks (P4 was better at Q3 engine games)

Honestly unless you were compiling Linux kernels, the early Pentium 4 line didn't really compete at all with the later Athlon Thunderbirds (1.2-1.4ghz), nor the Athlon XP line. This was especially true in games under both open gl and direct x.

Given that, and the fact that the Athlon and Duron line ran rampant all over the Pentium III and Celeron during the Socket 370/slot 1/socket a/slot a period, I am not surprised at all that people prefer to go with AMD builds for legacy gaming. What held true then still holds true now for those same older titles people want to play. Doesn't mean that early P4 cant do the job well, because it can. It just means it cant do it as well as AMD's cpus had done.

Why people would choose a Pentium 3 build over a early Pentium 4 build however, that is more likely then not related to nostalgia and the fact there is still a lot of angst out there regarding the early P4's lackluster performance. A lot of Intel diehards felt pretty let down by that line, but had fond memories of the Pentium 3 because it held its own better during its period on the market.

Well I once had a Nortwood 2.6 and that machine was a beauty. 2 GB Ram (heaps back in the day) with a Radeon 9800 and a 21" Compaq CRT. It was a fine machine...

The next machine was AMD though. An overclocked Sempron from 1.6 GHz to 2.4. Everyone who knew about computers went with AMD at that point in time. Until Core 2 Duo came out that is. BAM you could buy AMD CPUs for half price 🤣

ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

Honestly unless you were compiling Linux kernels, the early Pentium 4 line didn't really compete at all with the later Athlon Th […]
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sgt76 wrote:

First point for discussion- I find it pretty strange that most retro builders stick to P3/ Athlon builds for circa 2000-2002 machines. Given that the original s423 was launched in Nov 2000 and ran until Jul'01 and the Willamette s478s were out in Aug 01, that makes them congruent with the same timeframe as the much loved Tually and Athlon builds.

sgt76 wrote:

From a devil's advocate perspective, early P4 systems have some advantages over comparable P3 and Athlon systems- but especially over the P3s- larger ram support (up to 2gb), better memory bandwidth performance, better gaming benchmarks (P4 was better at Q3 engine games)

Honestly unless you were compiling Linux kernels, the early Pentium 4 line didn't really compete at all with the later Athlon Thunderbirds (1.2-1.4ghz), nor the Athlon XP line. This was especially true in games under both open gl and direct x.

Given that, and the fact that the Athlon and Duron line ran rampant all over the Pentium III and Celeron during the Socket 370/slot 1/socket a/slot a period, I am not surprised at all that people prefer to go with AMD builds for legacy gaming. What held true then still holds true now for those same older titles people want to play. Doesn't mean that early P4 cant do the job well, because it can. It just means it cant do it as well as AMD's cpus had done.

Why people would choose a Pentium 3 build over a early Pentium 4 build however, that is more likely then not related to nostalgia and the fact there is still a lot of angst out there regarding the early P4's lackluster performance. A lot of Intel diehards felt pretty let down by that line, but had fond memories of the Pentium 3 because it held its own better during its period on the market.

And at the higher end of the P4 spectrum, the FX-55 kicked the crap out of the Extreme Edition in games. The EE was faster in some application benches, but people who needed a CPU with high application performance usually went with a Xeon so the EE was pretty much between a rock and a hard place. Gamers didn't want it because the performance was too low compared to a A64-FX but neither did people who needed to run apps because most of them bought Xeons. The EE's were also pretty much at the limit of the Netburst's thermal efficiency so they were horrible overclockers. What you got out of the box was pretty much all there was.

I prefer P3 over P4 as P3 runs a lot cooler, so it's less worry about finding a good cooling solution for the case (as you noticed in my rigs thread, I take great care in making sure theres enough cool air to go around 😉 ).
The Intel cooling solution for s423/s478 was superior and easier to work with then the old-style clamps, but as P4 ran hotter this was also necessary.

Even though I never liked netburst myself (I always evaded netburst when it came to building a new rig), I'm more of the type who wants to see for himself instead of only relying on benchmarks and hear-say.
I'm not saying hear-say is wrong though, it usually gives an indication of how things could be.

I'm still gonna build me a netburst though, I found that AC CPU cooler today, it should be more quiet then those Intel stock vacuum cleaners 😜

Tetrium wrote:

I prefer P3 over P4 as P3 runs a lot cooler, so it's less worry about finding a good cooling solution for the case (as you notic […]
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I prefer P3 over P4 as P3 runs a lot cooler, so it's less worry about finding a good cooling solution for the case (as you noticed in my rigs thread, I take great care in making sure theres enough cool air to go around 😉 ).
The Intel cooling solution for s423/s478 was superior and easier to work with then the old-style clamps, but as P4 ran hotter this was also necessary.

Even though I never liked netburst myself (I always evaded netburst when it came to building a new rig), I'm more of the type who wants to see for himself instead of only relying on benchmarks and hear-say.
I'm not saying hear-say is wrong though, it usually gives an indication of how things could be.

I'm still gonna build me a netburst though, I found that AC CPU cooler today, it should be more quiet then those Intel stock vacuum cleaners 😜

Netburst. The first CPU to require a 2 pound block of aluminum and a 80mm fan to dissipate the heat. 😁

Frist of all there nothing wrong with Prescotts and the best thing in world to do is to just turning HyperThreading OFF and used a good aftermarket heatsinker heck even to days late's Core i7 run hot with HyperThreading ON as much 10/15 degree higher.
That's 2 pound block of copper core sliderider.
Tom Hardware was big fat lair and cheated back in thoses day the best place to look is Anand's or [H]ardOCP.

I think Northwood is a great P4. Northwood is basically Athlon XP's equal but you get the ability to use Intel chipsets which is nice.

The other P4 cores are less interesting due to their struggle to compete with the AMD chip of the day.

shspvr wrote:

Frist of all there nothing wrong with Prescotts and the best thing in world to do is to just turning HyperThreading OFF and used a good aftermarket heatsinker heck even to days late's Core i7 run hot with HyperThreading ON as much 10/5 degree higher.
That's 2 pound block of copper core sliderider.
Tom Hardware was big fat lair and cheated back in thoses day the best place to look is Anand's or [H]ardOCP.

Seriously, if you're going to go tossing accusations around against a site, please link to some valid proof or something to support your claims. TomsHardware was not the only site finding the early P4 to be slower, everyone did, including the end users. Sorry, that is just the reality of the situation.

Yeah Willamette and early Northwoods on the 845 chipset were not very exciting. But they weren't exactly horrible unless you had one of those 845 SDRAM setups.

But the higher-end Northwood chips combined with 850/865/875 are a different story and are pretty competitive. Athlon 64 is of course better though. But I think Athlon XP has few, if any, advantages over the non-super-hot P4s.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/6213/6

Don't need to just look Google Toms Hardware cheating and guest what FutureMark even Confirms that nVidia was cheating to back in days in fact so was ATI.
So you see you can't put any futh in Tom's or nVidia nor ATI.
So it just gose to show that some of thoses reviewer used custom mod drivers.

So you tell me Toms was cheating, but but your soul proof to that was a statement about how Nvidia got busted cheating on 3d Mark 2k3, which ATI did to some degree also, but in no way in the same manner as Nvidia. That really doesn't have anything to do with TomsHardware.

And as for the 3dMark 2k3 thing, Nvidia was cheating via not rendering entire sections of the test. Ati's "cheats" were optimizations, which they stopped doing and still blew the FX away anyway with not much of a loss in their score. Like I said, if you are going to go make such accusations, please provide some proof. Its not our job to prove your point, that job is yours.

I watched the P4 come out with great interest because it came at a time where I had a good job and had spare money. That being said, I went AMD. the Willamette SUCKED. Everyone I knew at the time went with the 1.4 ghz p3 or the 1.4 Athlon. I got a 1800+ and it was great, overclocked like a champ and ran like a raped ape.

I went back to Intel for the Prescott chip on a p4c800e dlx (I miss that board). 2.8ghz. The board was fantastic! the chip ran hot until I put an XP-120 on it, then I know I had that thing running close to 3.5ghz. I later got a 3.2 and I hit 4ghz on water cooling. with a ati 9800 if memory serves me correctly. I LOVE the late netburst chips. I run a pair of 3.8ghz xeons in my minecraft server. I used to have them as a workstation in an asus NCCH-DL (with a nvidia 7800gs) and then to an asus NCT-D with a gtx 260. Those chips ran AWESOME and i had them running closet to 5ghz. I miss those boards... I wish I hadnt sold them

AMD and intel have been leapfrogging each other for ever. It will continue. Amd usually wins on price/performance ratio and Intel in the OMG RAW POWER but OMG EMPTY WALLET, department. Therefor I think people are interested in intel chips after the fact when they get cheap because of the "i wish I could have afforded that chip" factor.

Athlon 64 FX-55 was nice but was way over Price at time wasn't some thing like $700 just gain 10% over intel counter part and that why it fail gain any head way from intel and now why do you think intel is doing so poorly in trems of sale's now day where AMD is now wining on price/performance ratio and fact that the AMD motherboard don't cost a arm&leg even know Intel are far faster.

Yeah, P4 Prescott (socket 478, 800 MHz bus, 1 Mb L2 cache) is the excellent chip.
The only minus is - high TDP.
I'm still using P4 3 GHz as the dual Xp/ME PC.

sgt76 wrote:

From a devil's advocate perspective, early P4 systems have some advantages over comparable P3 and Athlon systems- but especially over the P3s- larger ram support (up to 2gb), better memory bandwidth performance, better gaming benchmarks (P4 was better at Q3 engine games), more robust cooling solutions- which when you've broken your s370 tabs you'll appreciate very much!, better featured and more robust motherboards, AGP 4x, USB 2.0, ATA 100. All this usually runs very stably too as P4 systems are generally rock solid with few idiosyncracies.

you're wrong
my asus A7V8X athlon XP board could do all of the above... stable and fast via chipset, AGP 8x, and promise SATA 1.5

it took clock speeds more than twice my slightly overclocked thoroughbred athlon XP 1600+ to even be slightly faster than it... that's with a preshott 2.66... I also had a northwood 3.0 and that thing was dog slow compared to the other two

only when I upgraded to the preshott 2M 3.2 did the performance match the athlon 64 x2 3600+ I was using

there's too many reasons to explain why people prefer to use P3 or athlons over P4s... they simply have more efficient cores... the P4s have too long of pipelines and thus have poor clock to performance ratio.... it's like having a big american V8 engine but with power of a small japanese V6... no guts!

This thread was bound to become a shooting match 😜

Anyway, I've read quite a lot about P4's supposed sluggishness. What would it take to have a Northwood, for instance, become 'quick'? Low memory latency?

shspvr wrote:

Athlon 64 FX-55 was nice but was way over Price at time wasn't some thing like $700 just gain 10% over intel counter part and that why it fail gain any head way from intel and now why do you think intel is doing so poorly in trems of sale's now day where AMD is now wining on price/performance ratio and fact that the AMD motherboard don't cost a arm&leg even know Intel are far faster.

Yeah, i7 is faster than Phenom II but look how much more it costs! The motherboards cost a lot more, too. Who cares how fast it is if you can't afford it?