Never got into the P4 when it was new (jumped from the P3 to Athlon), but I do have one setup as a Win98se machine here in my room (256MB DDR, Geforce 6800 AGP MSI 655 Max motherboard MS-6730). Very speedy for that OS.

archsan wrote:

TELEPACMAN wrote:

I mean even a brand new PC today could be a ideal Windows XP game machine don't you think?

Starting from Haswell, the answer is a definite no. 🙁

Once in a while I read this post, mainly to decide what to do with my pentium4, but this has always kept me thinking. what do you mean?

TELEPACMAN wrote:

archsan wrote:

Starting from Haswell, the answer is a definite no. 🙁

this has always kept me thinking

No WinXp drivers for 8-series and above chipsets. So - IvyBridge is the last Intel platform for WinXp.

AlphaWing wrote:

P4's are very OLD machines already to many of the cellphone generation already. I don't think many will care... the problem is m […]
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P4's are very OLD machines already to many of the cellphone generation already.
I don't think many will care... the problem is most P4's don't do anything unique really.
Compared to a modern PC. They just do it slower. Most XP things work fine in Vista\7\8. P4's mostly run XP.
And there are no ISA sound cards with unique sounds, etc to redeem them.

I thought that I should at least chip in as I've travelled all the way from 1997 to post on this forum:

To be brutally honest, we're (those of us who love and maintain old machines) kind of in a slim minority here relative to the general population. While I do feel nostalgia for my Athlon XP, most of them and their P4 contemporaries are making their way to landfills in much the same way that the Pentium IIIs, Pentiums, 486es, 386es, 286es, Commodore 64s, and original PCs did. I doubt that most of the people who lived through the 1990s would want another 486 box. Likewise, most of the people who lived through the '80s aren't pining for their C64s. I certainly doubt that my parents want their punched cards, mechanical typewriters, and black and white TVs either. This is what makes us unique. We do want to care for these computers so that not only can we live through the awesomeness that they once were, but can preserve them in a working state for the future. There are groups like ours for pretty much every technology that got obsoleted and discarded (like the steam locomotive aficionados, etc).

It's true that most of my generation won't want their old P4s back, though it's also true that not many other generations will either. Speaking about my peers, some of them are more "nostalgic" for the 1990s than the '00s and actively play with Super Nintendos and N64s (I'm too busy rocking my Genesis to notice much). There's a large set of them who play Rollercoaster Tycoon and AOE II every once in a while. Some think that it's weird that I'm happier with a Pentium III thinkpad than I am with my crap-tastic laptop from 2014. I'd like to mention that there is an entire group of people still using their PowerPC macs, and that both their software and hardware have http://ppcluddite.blogspot.com/2014/10/mac-os … htning-rod.html come http://ppcluddite.blogspot.com/2014/09/gawker … onsumerism.html under attack.

Anyway, to actually speak on topic, an early P4 (socket 423 most notably) still has a pretty big weirdness factor that I think would be great for a retro rig. Later P4s I really don't care for, though they do overclock nicely and they're cheap enough not to care about in terms of stability or cooling.

I agree with many people here in that the P4 was a pretty terrible processor. And as someone else said, there are floods of them on craigslist, many in the form of old Dell Dimensions. I can understand using a P4 for a retro gaming machine because it's dirt cheap, but that's about it. There's just not much to be nostalgic about with these processors, unless perhaps one was in your very first computer. And there's so many of them, I don't see them ever appreciating in value, even when they're 50 years old. I think it's a much better bet to just be patient and try to piece together a Pentium III system.

I have a love/hate relationship with Pentium 4's. Yes, they're slow. Yes, they're hot. Yes, they use a lot of power. Yet I still get a warm fuzzy feeling when I restore a P4 trash picked machine to its former not-so-glory. I wasn't even particularly attached to them when they were new. I had a 1.6GHZ Willamette machine for a few years which was truly awful and which I replaced with a much faster AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Winchester.

I just got a Prescott 3.2GHZ HT rig up and running for some WinXP gaming, and I'm loving it. I can't explain it!

My opinion these days is it's silly to try to look at this hardware too critically. It's fun to mess around with different hardware. The power consumption of Prescott isn't shocking compared to more modern stuff. It can be handled quietly without exotic means. Northwood is hardly excessive. Athlon and Athlon XP consume a good amount of power too.

You also need to look at the big picture in that a P4 with an Intel motherboard chipset is solid and reliable. AMD usually has quirks on the VIA, SiS and NV chipsets. Intel had (has) the resources to develop much better platforms.

Pentium 4s get a lot of hate, but honestly, they're not THAT bad for playing older games, or even for day to day computing if you're really desperate. Just don't expect to play too many games made past the early 2000s or watch any HD videos on one. That said, there doesn't seem to be anything terribly special about them, because so many of them were sold, and I used to see PILES of them at the e-recycling center I once frequented. The pawn shops here have a ton of them too, often for some outrageously overinflated prices.

Now, Athlon XP systems, THOSE are special. Usually they were owned by more tech saavy consumers, and as a result, they tend to come with things like aftermarket video cards and ram upgrades. 😁

I loved my Athlon XP unlocked mobile version paired with the nforce2 chipset (was into silent computing then) it was a superfast system at only 2000MHz.

Gamecollector wrote:

PcBytes wrote:

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?

Intel 865PE/875P chipsets have an ISA support (but w/o DMA). The trouble is - 865PE+ISA motherboards are extremely rare and industrial only. Plus you can't use this "ISA" for soundcards.

wow ok this is interesting.
is there any pentium 4 boards that have ISA slots that will work with Sound cards properly?
there was another intel board , D845WR or is this the same as the one u mention, in that it does not support DMA?
is this the same for any of the socket 775 boards that have ISA slots aswell? none of them work for sound cards?

PcBytes wrote:

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?

Yes it does, and not only that. I have a Matsonic VIA KT400 with a single ISA slot.

The funny thing is that a well configured P4 machine still makes a great daily or backup comp running XP, Linux, or 7 even. Add a good video card, max out the ram, maybe replace that nasty old Celeron with a 3.0ghz Prescott or Northwood and all of a sudden you have a computer that can do anything the casual web browser needs 😀

ODwilly wrote:

The funny thing is that a well configured P4 machine still makes a great daily or backup comp running XP, Linux, or 7 even. Add a good video card, max out the ram, maybe replace that nasty old Celeron with a 3.0ghz Prescott or Northwood and all of a sudden you have a computer that can do anything the casual web browser needs 😀

I agree. For several months now I've been intending to put together a ~3GHz Northwood or Prescott Dell to use as a secondary general PC and also for LAN games. I already have the Dell case/board so it makes sense to put it to use.
I also rounded up a few late AGP cards that I'm going to benchmark in it. I want it to be as decent as possible with more modern demands, including H264 video, modern web, and late DX9 games. That project stalled because of inadequate RAM and a loss of interest, but I'll get back to it.

From what I've tried thus far I'm pretty happy with it. The late P4s still perform decently. I think SSE2 has allowed these CPUs to age a lot better than the Athlon XP has. I still have my old nForce2 Barton rig that used to be my main PC, but it just doesn't hang with modern stuff anymore. The P4 still can.

Prescott adds SSE3 so I've been thinking it would be a good idea to use one. I'm really disappointed how much hotter they make the motherboard VRM run though. The biggest reason the Prescott bothers me is because it will raise the ambient case temperature which could shorten the life of whatever AGP card I use. On that basis I might end up settling for a Northwood, but that's undecided. I need better examples of both chips to really decide which I like better.

I think HyperThreading also helps Pentium4s keep up with more modern tasks. That alone might allow the P4 to age better than Athlon 64s.

In some non Intel P4 mobos, SB compatible PCI soundcards work right.

The Prescott 550 3.4 Ghz system I built for the lunchroom at work still soldiers on! It has been running 24/7 for about 5 years now in a Packard Bell case (without ventilation) from an old Slot-1 system and using the Packard Bells old 235W PSU.

I only used... ehm parts I wanted to part with, the motherboard for example is so badly scratched its a wonder it works at all. One memory channel is dead as ALOT of traces are severed so the system has to make do with 2x1GB single channel memory.

When I built the system it was to get some final use from these parts, I diddnt think the system would last more than a couple of months. 😀

The only reason I'm using a P4 is because the board I'm using to test a buttload of graphics cards and games has AGP and PCIe and is socket 478. It's a 3.2GHz HT CPU so it can handle most things of that era and was my main gaming machine for a long time (until DX10 happened).

brassicGamer wrote:

The only reason I'm using a P4 is because the board I'm using to test a buttload of graphics cards and games has AGP and PCIe and is socket 478. It's a 3.2GHz HT CPU so it can handle most things of that era and was my main gaming machine for a long time (until DX10 happened).

Which board is that? I have an LGA775 board with both AGP and PCIe (limited to x4) as well as DDR and DDR2:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/4CoreDual-VSTA/

I have two P4 retro PCs that don't get much use:
1) P4 2.53Ghz/512MB RAM/ATI Radeon 9800Pro/SBLive!/Win98SE. I basically just built it to see if it would take Win98, then ran a few benchmarks on it. The motherboard is out of an OEM HP, so it's a bit wonky, but it works. It is waiting in the wings as an emergency backup to my main Win98 rig. It certainly would be considered extremely high-end for Win98.
2) P4 2.4Ghz/2GB/GeForce 6800GS AGP/SBLive!/WinXP. It's actually a Dell OptiPlex GX270 that someone gave me to pull their photos off of and throw out. I added the 6800GS, RAM and SBLive! It's not in use at the moment, but is perfect for playing GOG.com games.

I never owned a P4 when they were current, so it's kind of fun to mess with them now. 😀 (I went from P3->AthlonXP->C2D)

clueless1 wrote:

brassicGamer wrote:

The only reason I'm using a P4 is because the board I'm using to test a buttload of graphics cards and games has AGP and PCIe and is socket 478. It's a 3.2GHz HT CPU so it can handle most things of that era and was my main gaming machine for a long time (until DX10 happened).

Which board is that? I have an LGA775 board with both AGP and PCIe (limited to x4) as well as DDR and DDR2:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/4CoreDual-VSTA/

Pretty much same board except for the socket:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/P4Dual-880Pro/