Mainly because they are dirt cheap. Its no wonder though since they were terrible processors.

Some people have success with P4's in 98\ME
I'm not one of them, none of the P4 mobos I own are stable enough for me in 9x, especially the i850 Rdram based ones I own.

I use a 24/2.4ghz setup for "high end" win98SE gaming and it works very well for me with a voodoo2 SLI setup, a GF6800GT and a SB Live! ...

Same here, my P4-3.6 Prescott based XP/W98se rig runs just fine and dandy. 7900GTX/512mb and 2gb DDR2 can even be coaxed into playing nice with W98 using Rlowe's memory patch.

So the P4 throws off a lot of heat - a lot of it... making it fun and rewarding to devise an effective cooling system. A Cooler Master Hyper 101+ and a pair of 92mm AVC fans in push/pull mode tames the beast just fine...

Cheap also means it's easier to look past 'technical inelegance'..

TELEPACMAN wrote:

I imagine a Pentium4 could be a good high end win98 gaming pc, is this the main reason? Or am I missing something?

Generally there is no support for ISA sound cards or even support for the legacy SB Live DOS drivers, and Win9x cannot generally use more than 512 MB of RAM. (There's a lot of weird, contradictory advice floating around on that particular subject.) I believe I've read that Win9x itself starts running into problems on fast processors.

But aside from that, they do run Win9x games really, really fast.

My P4 system feels much like a 1998 machine with an overkill processor, thanks to the video cards being reasonable bottlenecks. Speedy loading (and installing!) times are a nice advantage as well as stability (for non-HT processors).

Yes, there is no ISA (with normal mobos that is) and you need to run a couple of mem and cpu patches if you want to add more than 512MB of RAM or a very fast cpu.
I kept my p4 machine at 512MB DDR1 and I didn't have to run any patches for the cpu but I did install the unofficial SP1 . Personally lack of ISA does not bother me with such a machine, it's a windows one after all 😀

I use a P4 simply because it's what I had on hand. I agree with leileilol on speedy loading and installing times vs older CPUs, and (at least for my chip) heat isn't a terrible problem (I have one of the older Pentium 4s though); the Intel stock sink works just fine for me. I would keep an eye on backwards compatibility as folks have mentioned - you will generally give up ISA and 3.3V AGP support (this means no/few compatible 3dfx AGP cards), both of which are usually common features of a Windows 95/98 gaming system. Also as others have said, P4 hardware is plentiful and inexpensive (they're probably among the most mass produced CPUs ever), compared to the rising prices of Pentium 3 (and older) hardware as "retro" becomes trendy.

leileilol wrote:

My P4 system feels much like a 1998 machine with an overkill processor, thanks to the video cards being reasonable bottlenecks. Speedy loading (and installing!) times are a nice advantage as well as stability (for non-HT processors).

This is a plus. However it doesn't make me prefer a P4 over a P3 for win98.
It seems price could really be the answer.

My Win98-P4 Box is working great. I have used the following hardware:

Asrock P4V88.
2.8 Gigaherz CPU.
NorthQ 60 millimeter Copper cooler.
1 Gigabyte Dual Channel PC3200 Memory. (4x256mb Single Side)
Asus A9600SE/TD/P/128M/A (written on the label)
Creative SB-LIVE Value Edition.
Seagate Barracuda 120 gigabyte PATA HDD. (modded to 32 using Seatools)
Realtek 1000 megabit PCI netcard.

This machine is working great, and I am really happy with this build.
Unreal tournament is really flying on the machine, as well as all other games I have installed.
Yes... I can not use it for DOS gaming, because of the masked DMA (Sound issues).
Never the less. It is a mighty fine machine for pure Win98 gaming.

Price and availability. I have yet to find a single P3 in the wild, but a lot of 478 rigs. Up until recently 1.5mb DSL or terrible satellite has been the fastest internet available in my area, I know a couple with a p4 that use 14k dialup still for emails. So far iv found a SS7 compaq and a slot 1 p3 compaq, both fried and retired years ago, but nothing else pre-478.

Also motherboards vary greatly. I do get DOS sound with my SBPC128 in mine.

keropi wrote:

Yes, there is no ISA (with normal mobos that is)

With a P4 you've presumably chosen to go beyond ISA-bound games, so that's not such a limitation. If you're looking for the elusive "one retro rig solution" a P4 is certainly not optimal, but for the late 98/dos window/XP crossover period it's fine...

I found P4 systems very easy to work with. SATA connectors offer a wider range of storage options. Stability is fantastic. Cooling is also great especially compared to Tualatin cooling because of the extra height of these chips. V2 SLI works well.

Main downside if you want to go 3dfx is that AGP cards, apart from the V4 4500, aren't compatible with the AGP slot. A PIII-S Tualatin is better for a V5 5500 in this case.

P4s are probably at their peak of availability and cheap price right now. They're mostly regarded as obsolete and there's way more of them still alive right now than the number of people who want them.
I imagine lots of people find them for free and want to come up with a use for them. I have no problem with that, but if you take cost out of it, I don't think they're ideal for very much.

mPGA478 gets points for the CPU heatsink retention. It's robust, and doesn't threaten to break the motherboard every time you manipulate it, unlike socket 370. If something did happen, just replace the plastic mounting frame and it's fixed.
Later models have onboard SATA, which might be convenient but it's not a big deal really.

But they have limitations with ISA and older AGP cards, as others have described. They also just seem too new for me to get very excited about them. I guess it depends what the person expects from the machine. As a generic 2nd PC, they're fine, even practical since you can still run recent software on them, no issue with large hard drives, and no significant RAM limitation. As a place to install lots of not-so-old games that you don't want on your main PC, they're fine. But for a really retro experience with *old* games, I want to run old cards and so the P4 wouldn't be very appealing IMO.

I used to find old PCs in local thrift stores, but I think they've stopped selling them, I fear some lawyer has gotten to them. Back when I was finding them, P3s were getting noticeably more uncommon and it seemed almost everything that ever showed up was a P4 Dell Dimension.
My biggest regret is that I passed on an older Dell that had a slot-1 Katmai core 600MHz P3 in it. That was the only Katmai 600 I'll probably ever see. Should have bought it, just for the CPU.

My next door neighbor is trying to get rid of an 866mhz p3 Dell xps system and cant find anyone that doesn't scoff at him. I lack the space to take it 😒

I admittedly only built a P4 setup for retrogaming because it was the only way to have a decent XP-grade machine while still having full-blown ISA for DOS/Win9x usage. Can't do that with Athlon XP/64, the right chipsets just don't exist.

I wanted to see if I could get away with not having separate 98/XP boxes, and it would be fun to pit a P4 3.2 GHz (initially Prescott, now Gallatin because someone sold an Extreme Edition real cheap) against an Athlon XP 3200+.

This is admittedly with a BC875PLG industrial motherboard. Only one I could find with the 875P chipset, an AGP slot and at least one ISA slot. Most other industrial mobos with both slot types are 845P, sometimes 865G, and the former's crippled by not supporting 800 MHz FSB.

This also brings other modern amenities like built-in SATA and USB boot support alongside the usual F-key quick boot menu so I don't have to go rummaging through the BIOS to change the boot order. It's better for me to pick my OS that way than through some bootloader that tends to get screwed up too easily. Each OS gets its own drive.

Driver support under Win9x has not been a problem. About all I need to do is run the rlowe RAM patch so I can keep 2 GB of RAM installed. XP likes having that 2 GB in dual-channel.

Not having 3.3V AGP also isn't a problem because I'm running a GeForce 6800 Ultra. Fastest AGP card I can get away with under Win9x, and also period-appropriate for that CPU, but the FX 5950 Ultra might offer more retro compatibility at the expense of SM3.0 and godawful SM2.0 performance.

On the other hand, the BIOS is so limited that I can't even change the CPU clock settings, despite the manual showing a page for it. Of course, I'm not concerned about overclocking, but rather UNDERclocking for those games that don't like fast CPUs, of which I have a few.

I see no way to mod the BIOS to unlock said options, either.

Guess I'll have to find a program that'll tell the chipset to downclock the whole thing via SpeedStep or something.

ODwilly wrote:

My next door neighbor is trying to get rid of an 866mhz p3 Dell xps system and cant find anyone that doesn't scoff at him. I lack the space to take it 😒

Take it. Its worth it
P3s are getting rare. Sell it soon if you have to but please rescue

NamelessPlayer wrote:

I admittedly only built a P4 setup for retrogaming because it was the only way to have a decent XP-grade machine while still having full-blown ISA for DOS/Win9x usage. Can't do that with Athlon XP/64, the right chipsets just don't exist.

Doesn't VIA's KT133 have ISA support?