Wow, this thread kinda misses the point on nostalgia of gaming.

The OS. Pentium 4 was more for XP and newer hardware for the time. Not many P4 boards supported older AGP 2x/4x cards or ISA. Buh-bye 3dfx/Geforce 1-2-3 etc...

Athlons would be a good choice for nostalgic gaming but parts are scarce then you have the age old problem of first finding a working motherboard (busted caps) then dealing with less than stellar VIA chipset issues.

Anything Pentium 3 with a intel chipset will be more reliable and better compatibility with an older OS like Windows 98SE/ME/MS-Dos. Also less issues as some early games like POD had to have patches run on a P4/athlon. So the 810/815 chipsets limited to 512mb, so what, 98SE/ME worked superb with that much or less.

Next since P4/ Athlon XP's were more XP gaming times then you might as well scrape the system and use your newer Core/sandybrige/Phenom/Rigor or whatever as it will work just fine on the newer hardware all maxed out. Bigger problem I've seen with older XP games would be problems on videocards with StreamProcessors, but I hear drivers have fixed most of that. If not then use a 7800GTX or equivelant.

So I own a S478 Northwood 3.2GHz 2GB DDR400, and a RARE PCI-E 16x Mobo with a 7800GT. I still find it a waste as anything it can do my Phenom x4 can do as good if not better.

I'm curious about the performance comparison between an industrial P4 based mobo (with that ISA retro flavour), and an Athlon XP based mobo.

P4 spec -
iBASE MB800H, i845GE, 3.06Ghz Northwood CPU, DDR333

XP spec -
Epox 8KTA3(+)Pro, VIA KT133A, 2600+ T-Bred or a 3000+ XP-M CPU, DDR266, FSB 133

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Wow, this thread kinda misses the point on nostalgia of gaming.

This part of the forum is not entirely about retro gaming. You are right that there's little point to messing with anything older than a Core 2 for most XP games. But here people are just messing with that middle of the road Athlon / P4 junk because they like to. They probably aren't going to be doing much more than brief testing on it. It's just a project.

If you want to extend this line of thinking to DOS games, then all of the 8088, 286s, 386s and 486s are kinda pointless too because they can't run all DOS games perfectly. Might as well dump the hardware and just use DOSBOX because it's much more flexible. If playing games is the only goal, then that's the best route. But that's not the motivation around here.

retro games 100 wrote:

I'm curious about the performance comparison between an industrial P4 based mobo (with that ISA retro flavour), and an Athlon XP based mobo.

Just imagine how much of a bottleneck the ISA bus is for such a processor. Yikes.

swaaye wrote:

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Wow, this thread kinda misses the point on nostalgia of gaming.

This part of the forum is not entirely about retro gaming. You are right that there's little point to messing with anything older than a Core 2 for most XP games. But here people are just messing with that middle of the road Athlon / P4 junk because they like to.

True enough. Tetrium does point out using a P4/ Athlon for everyday use on XP. For most using older hardware one would think games for games... as seen some 3d benchmarks were linked.

I'm not trying to put down Athlon/P4 or calling it junk. Its fun to experiment. I won't part with my rare PCI-E 16x P4 for some reason 😉

@ ProfessorProfessorson....

I remember reading some reviews saying the 1GHz coppermine was faster than a 1GHz classic athlon. Then the same with a Tualatin P3-S 1.4GHz vs. 1.4GHz Thunderbird. So I wouldn't say they were rampant over a PIII. Unless you mean DDR vs. PC133 which is biased.

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Wow, this thread kinda misses the point on nostalgia of gaming. […]
Show full quote

Wow, this thread kinda misses the point on nostalgia of gaming.

The OS. Pentium 4 was more for XP and newer hardware for the time. Not many P4 boards supported older AGP 2x/4x cards or ISA. Buh-bye 3dfx/Geforce 1-2-3 etc...

Athlons would be a good choice for nostalgic gaming but parts are scarce then you have the age old problem of first finding a working motherboard (busted caps) then dealing with less than stellar VIA chipset issues.

Anything Pentium 3 with a intel chipset will be more reliable and better compatibility with an older OS like Windows 98SE/ME/MS-Dos. Also less issues as some early games like POD had to have patches run on a P4/athlon. So the 810/815 chipsets limited to 512mb, so what, 98SE/ME worked superb with that much or less.

Next since P4/ Athlon XP's were more XP gaming times then you might as well scrape the system and use your newer Core/sandybrige/Phenom/Rigor or whatever as it will work just fine on the newer hardware all maxed out. Bigger problem I've seen with older XP games would be problems on videocards with StreamProcessors, but I hear drivers have fixed most of that. If not then use a 7800GTX or equivelant.

So I own a S478 Northwood 3.2GHz 2GB DDR400, and a RARE PCI-E 16x Mobo with a 7800GT. I still find it a waste as anything it can do my Phenom x4 can do as good if not better.

What do you have? An Asrock P4VM890 motherboard?

sliderider wrote:

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.

If you build an AMD system and an Intel system for the same money the AMD system comes out on top. Yeah, i7 is faster than Phenom II but look how much more it costs! Who cares how fast it is if you can't afford it? With the cost of Intel motherboards you'd have to put an i5 on it to be able to get the total cost down to the price of a Phenom II x6 system and it would be slower.

That ture min of us can't afford 2x the cost for intel just for the faster Benchmarking with video card and I usely try build midd rager system.
At the time which was little over 1 1/2 years ago Phenom II x6, i3 and i5 where not out and only thoses i7 1st Generation super high price one's where out that why end up I build a AMD Phenom II Black Edition.
I got all of this for under $500 in late 2009
Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P
AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition (OC 3.2Gz)
4GB memory
ATI Radeon HD5850 PCIe

I'm super happy with above setup performance unlike in the pass where the last time tryed build AMD I had all kind of problem with it and busmastering like audio snap, crackle, pop and video caputering problem which why I hated some AMD 3rdparty chipset and there very poor performance.

Before that is was a
After 3 long years it time I sold her to a friend which he still has
Intel P4 2.8GHz 478 Prescott
Intel D865PERL Motherboard
2GB Memory
ATI Radeon HD3850 AGP

TheMAN wrote:

you're wrong
my asus A7V8X athlon XP board could do all of the above...

except SSE2

Loads of P4 mobos come with a SoundMax audio chipset which has somewhat interesting DOS compatibility, though no FM at all 🙁

Also, the PowerVR PCX2 works fine on Pentium 4. It made great testing convenience when I had a P4+PVR setup, plus it probably helped make Deus Ex run great on it

There's a WEE bit of nostalgia to me involving the Pentium 4 and 2000-2001 gen computer stuff... sure it's 'post-3dfx death era' but that doesn't mean you can't make a top of the line Intel 2000 p4 1.2ghz Windows 2000/ME Sb Live 5.1 Geforce2 rig. 😀

sliderider wrote:

What do you have? An Asrock P4VM890 motherboard?

Albatron PX915P4C Pro (Chipset: Intel 915P/ICH6)
http://www.albatron.com.tw/English/product/mb … fication&no=160

One of the last and best you could find. I got one of the last available on newegg in the states. I had my 3.2GHz up around 4GHz but the PSU didn't like it. I recently got a XP90 or XP120 heatsink for $10. Don't think I'm gonna pull my Gigabyte G-Power Lite if running stock speeds though.

leileilol wrote:

except SSE2 […]
Show full quote

TheMAN wrote:

you're wrong
my asus A7V8X athlon XP board could do all of the above...

except SSE2

Loads of P4 mobos come with a SoundMax audio chipset which has somewhat interesting DOS compatibility, though no FM at all 🙁

Also, the PowerVR PCX2 works fine on Pentium 4. It made great testing convenience when I had a P4+PVR setup, plus it probably helped make Deus Ex run great on it

There's a WEE bit of nostalgia to me involving the Pentium 4 and 2000-2001 gen computer stuff... sure it's 'post-3dfx death era' but that doesn't mean you can't make a top of the line Intel 2000 p4 1.2ghz Windows 2000/ME Sb Live 5.1 Geforce2 rig. 😀

I said board, not CPU 😒
who cares about SSE2 for such an old system?

SSE2 was actually a pretty big issue back in the day. A lot of benchmarks like Sisoft Sandra favoured the P4 because of it.
The athlon may have been faster in the real world but a lot of magazines/websites were publishing graphs that told a different story.

Does anyone happen to know the max memory supported by the i915 chipset?

SSE2 was what programmers were supposed to use for all floating point because P4 is totally designed around the use of SIMD. It truly sucks at x87. Athlon on the other hand is a x87 beast by x86 standards but didn't even have SSE until AXP.

When Intel wrote that optimized FlaskMPEG SSE2 exe we got to see that P4 had a strength after all. Media encoding was its forte if MMX/SSEx was heavily used.

Unfortunately for P4 not every program is a good fit for SIMD and not all programmers care to dump the time into it.

sliderider wrote:

Does anyone happen to know the max memory supported by the i915 chipset?

My Pentium M notebook with 915PM only supported 2GB. I tried 4GB once but it only saw half.

Edit - wiki says 4gb for desktop chipsets.

sliderider wrote:

Does anyone happen to know the max memory supported by the i915 chipset?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_ch … Series_chipsets

and when they say 4gb i bet they really mean 3.5gb

luckybob wrote:

and when they say 4gb i bet they really mean 3.5gb

unless you have a 64bit CPU and can run a 64bit OS that's how it be. Although I have seen some boards still only give around that due to some addressable limit.

swaaye wrote:

luckybob wrote:

and when they say 4gb i bet they really mean 3.5gb

unless you have a 64bit CPU and can run a 64bit OS that's how it be.

the CHIPSET has to support 64 bit too. A lot diddn't.

luckybob wrote:

the CHIPSET has to support 64 bit too. A lot diddn't.

Yes you are correct. That didn't immediately occur to me. I recall a 945 setup like that now.

It may also be board or BIOS dependent.

just read the first post starting the topic, i know im\'m slow. I wanted to say the old AMDs mopped the floor with the old P4's not to say the P4 is bad still pretty usable. I put together a Socket A with a 2600+ and rather nice IDE drive scoring a 5.x in WEI in win7. i pair ed it with an nvidia 6200 and win 7 it ran flash and aero like a normal modern machine.

Now I have just redone my sisters machine witch slowly elvolved from an old case painted pink and shitty p3 to a 2.66 P4 OCed to 3ghz and a new case an x1550 pro. Now i'm wondering just how far the old P4s over clocked and I' am also impressed with the performance runs win 7 and games fine how ever the gfx card is the bottle neck I get lag in games like The Maw but, only using a portion of the memory and only 20 percent CPU. then again 128bit ddr2 gfx is still kind of crap.

thats my 2 cents and questions, not quite the retro gaming conversation you were looking for. BTW i found some DDR2 PCIe socket 478 boards one witch i have had running 24/7 for the past 3 years runs pretty decent looking to get another for an old dell at work. was wondering if any one else have used these boards and or what they think of them. they are made by biostar.

p4 totally sucks, in both performance and power consumption. the real king before conroe is pentium-m which was based on p3, intel was well aware of that and always feared that it would crush the figure of the p4, so they had to imprison it in the mobiles until p4 was finally dead when they hit the heat barrier(at 4ghz). 😠