smeezekitty wrote:

Sutekh94 wrote:

Who knows, it might even pull off Assassin's Creed Unity.

Kind of doubt that one

I know, that's why I put the 😜 at the end of that sentence. I do intend on torturing my main comp with that game some day, though. 😜

Also, this thread has been making me want to do an experiment, with a P4, Vista (and 7), and something like a GTX 660. Basically seeing how far you can go in terms of gaming on a P4.

Skyscraper wrote:

Youtube 720p plays perfectly on my P4 3066 and that is an old single core with only 533 MHz FSB. The P4 Prescott 550 3.4 Ghz we use in the lunch room at work also plays Youtube 720p just fine, and this P4 Vista system diddnt have any issues with handeling Youtube 720p with the X300 installed.

My experience is that most Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading can handle Youtube 720p while the ones without struggle.

This is using Flash not sure about HTML5.

Hm, maybe it's a Linux issue. The P4 originally had an X300 in it, which couldn't play local video at all and was struggling with Flash video. With an HD 4670 it works, it also worked with a G210 and the nVidia proprietary driver, same performance. Will compare against Windows.

I experimented a bit with Win7 on my 3.73GHz P4 recently.

General Windows performance was quite OK, but an Opteron 185@ 3GHz on Socket 939 and C2D E6600 easily outclassed it on the Internet. Driving a 2560x1440 monitor, the P4 definitely had frame rate issues when scrolling through certain web pages in Firefox. On sites where the P4 coughed up what looked like ~15fps, the Opty and C2D were capable of at least 30. The UI framerate improved on a 1080p monitor.

On Youtube, the P4 could only handle 720p smoothly. The Opteron and C2D setups both had no problem with 1080p. A G80-based 8800GTS was used in each machine, so H.264 video decoding was done in software by the processor.

Overall, surfing the modern Internet on the Opteron and C2D wasn't too, too different from my daily driver, a 4.3GHz i7-4930K. The experience on the P4 definitely could've used some improvement. But it's a totally old processor, so that's to be expected! 😀

oerk wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

Youtube 720p plays perfectly on my P4 3066 and that is an old single core with only 533 MHz FSB. The P4 Prescott 550 3.4 Ghz we use in the lunch room at work also plays Youtube 720p just fine, and this P4 Vista system diddnt have any issues with handeling Youtube 720p with the X300 installed.

My experience is that most Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading can handle Youtube 720p while the ones without struggle.

This is using Flash not sure about HTML5.

Hm, maybe it's a Linux issue. The P4 originally had an X300 in it, which couldn't play local video at all and was struggling with Flash video. With an HD 4670 it works, it also worked with a G210 and the nVidia proprietary driver, same performance. Will compare against Windows.

Yeah, the graphics card gives the older system the ability to decode those video streams. Without those more modern graphics cards a P4 is really going to struggle on the internet today.

I want to see the power usage of a dual core P4 running 1080p Youtube. 🤣

I'm not super surprised that P4 does fairly well with video decode though. That's something SIMD optimization works well for and P4 can do well.

King_Corduroy wrote:

oerk wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

Youtube 720p plays perfectly on my P4 3066 and that is an old single core with only 533 MHz FSB. The P4 Prescott 550 3.4 Ghz we use in the lunch room at work also plays Youtube 720p just fine, and this P4 Vista system diddnt have any issues with handeling Youtube 720p with the X300 installed.

My experience is that most Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading can handle Youtube 720p while the ones without struggle.

This is using Flash not sure about HTML5.

Hm, maybe it's a Linux issue. The P4 originally had an X300 in it, which couldn't play local video at all and was struggling with Flash video. With an HD 4670 it works, it also worked with a G210 and the nVidia proprietary driver, same performance. Will compare against Windows.

Yeah, the graphics card gives the older system the ability to decode those video streams. Without those more modern graphics cards a P4 is really going to struggle on the internet today.

+1. A more powerful video card to take the heavy lifting off of the CPU would definitely be a godsend for a P4 system. Testing with the assumption that someone will not have a video card capable of decoding video streams is kind of unfair. Upgrading the video is the first step I would take if putting a P4 system on the internet.

When I upgrade the video, I put a decent CPU to pair with it. If you are going to use something fairly modern like a radeon 4xxx, then you should pair it with a decent CPU like a core 2.
It'll use less power and better take advantage of the card.

sliderider wrote:

King_Corduroy wrote:

[Yeah, the graphics card gives the older system the ability to decode those video streams. Without those more modern graphics cards a P4 is really going to struggle on the internet today.

+1. A more powerful video card to take the heavy lifting off of the CPU would definitely be a godsend for a P4 system. Testing with the assumption that someone will not have a video card capable of decoding video streams is kind of unfair. Upgrading the video is the first step I would take if putting a P4 system on the internet.

I know I'm hijacking a Vista thread here 🤣

I'm not certain the hardware acceleration works in Linux. So, Youtube, 480p, fullscreen, HTML5 with hardware acceleration in Chromium enabled: ~50% CPU over both cores. 720p: ~75% CPU. 1080p: forget about it. To be fair, this wouldn't have worked AT ALL on the X300.

Weird thing is, I have a Bobcat system (AMD E-350) running OpenELEC, so basically XBMC with a custom Linux, that doesn't have problems running HD content at all, despite the slow CPU. Everything works with hardware acceleration, so why doesn't it work in a major distro?

Might take it's brother out tomorrow - same basic system, but still stock (1 GB RAM, X300), running Windows 7, and see how it runs compared to Linux.

Weird thing is, I have a Bobcat system (AMD E-350) running OpenELEC, so basically XBMC with a custom Linux, that doesn't have problems running HD content at all, despite the slow CPU. Everything works with hardware acceleration, so why doesn't it work in a major distro?

We are talking about a Pee-4 remember?

Take a look: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/low_end_cpus.html
Pentium 4 3.73GHz scores 539 CPU marks
AMD E-350 scores 682 CPU marks at less than half the clock speed

Long pipeline oh how awesome it is

Remember modern software is no longer optimized for P4 too

swaaye wrote:

I want to see the power usage of a dual core P4 running 1080p Youtube. 🤣

My Xeon system was at around 200W running 1080p, it had two graphics cards (FX 5900 + FX 5200), two hard-drives, a few fans, etc and is on an 80Plus PSU for all that (so knock 15-20% off the top for the PSU). Average power draw sitting on the Vista desktop with Aero Glass enabled was around 160W (in XP that drops to around 130-140W), so it does see increased power draw (it puts all 4 logical processors at 90-100%), but it will go higher running 3DMark or AquaMark or other stressful 3D applications. I'm guessing if I had a GeForce 8400/8500/8600 in there it'd probably breeze through it (I'm curious if an 8400GS PCI would actually achieve this though).

A 65nm Pentium D with a single graphics card/hard-drive/etc on a modern PSU will be much lower (especially if that graphics card is capable of full decode) - remember that the CPUs alone in my setup are 210W TDP between them, and the FX 5900 isn't doing any favors for power draw either, while a 65nm P-D is generally 95W (some of the higher-spec chips are 130W), and should support better power management features (iirc the 65nm chips have EIST).

Vista ran better than XP ever did on the C2D build I had at the time. Vista just felt more responsive. My mother's laptop was the complete opposite. It was a low end laptop with a Turion 64 and some VIA chipset (and graphics). It is much better now that I put a dual core CPU and 4GB RAM in it, but it is still very slow at loading things. I want to replace the harddrive to see if that makes it any faster, but I feel it is too old and too slow for me to want to put any kind of money in it now. I rather get her a whole new computer.

I think the problem was that manufacturers put Vista on bad hardware with bad drivers, and Vista got blamed for it. I'm guessing the hardware team was told to make a computer for XP.

This makes me wonder. Was Me ever as bad as people say it was? I don't think I've ever seen a bad or unstable Me computer. They've all been pretty decent. I guess none of them tried to do anything fancy. They were all for the most part plain intel boxes.

I did not want to continue posting in the last thread so I thought I would do a slight Necro here. Sorry about that, what bios version are you running on your board? I upgraded from 3.18 to 3.25 IIRC but now I see a 3.28 on the HP support site. Under the original model number (without the added 1) the bios stopped at 3.25 but now I see that if you search for the ptgd1-la 3.28 comes up.EDIT: Tried out Bios 3.28 and still get the unsupported cpu error message. Man this stinks, lack a good board for the p4 670 and now this system is stuck with the TERRIBLE 524. Really who's bright idea was it to throttle a 3.06 Prescott with a 533 bus?