Well, this thread really went down the crapper.
I'm not going to say anything about P4 vs A64 here (I've used both, have formed my own conclusions, and would rather not be called an idiot).

HighTreason wrote:

The Athlon 64 was actually slower than the Athlon XP at the same clock.

I will say this, though. Athlon 64 is much faster than Athlon XP at the same clock, and the gap only increases as you run newer games/applications. Athlon 64 is quite similar to Athlon XP internally--it basically adds to the K7 architecture an on-chip memory controller, SSE2/SSE3 support, and a much wider bus to the L2 cache. How could it not be better than Athlon XP?

I dont need to run my own tests when every review ever done supports my claims, but your just some fan boy, you struck a nerve because my tolerance for what I consider idiots is being tried by you. I have zero tolerance for self righteous fanboys. You ignore evidence and you make false assumptions yet provide no proof for those assumptions, had this been a regulated debate you'd have lost. Please stop speaking until you are able to extract your head from your ass.

To be fair, P4s generally had better chipsets. I've dealt with SiS/ATI/NVidia/Via chipsets, (SiS on Intel and nForce on AMD in general) they're very quirky and often far behind. A good Intel chipset is far more stable.

calvin wrote:

To be fair, P4s generally had better chipsets. I've dealt with SiS/ATI/NVidia/Via chipsets, (SiS on Intel and nForce on AMD in general) they're very quirky and often far behind. A good Intel chipset is far more stable.

Indeed. This is a good argument for P4 that a lot of gamers didn't think about back in the Athlon times. Though it's also not entirely the chipsets at fault. The motherboards themselves were sometimes just poor quality implementations of the chipset.

Its not one persons fault this thread went down hill.

Claiming every gamer did this and that when you all know it isnt even close the truth did not exactly help 😀. The A64 was ~10% faster than competing Netburst CPUs in most games while the Netburst CPUs were better in some other tasks. All in all the K8 platforms perhaps won the performance race by 5% but with somewhat worse chipsets. The performance race were much more even back then compared to today with the Haswell vs Athlon FX 83xx.

For references that beats tomshardware.com check xtremesystems.org, "Forum ---> Hardware ---> Intel" from 2003 - 2005, there were alot of hardcore gamers with Intel setups there.

calvin wrote:

To be fair, P4s generally had better chipsets. I've dealt with SiS/ATI/NVidia/Via chipsets, (SiS on Intel and nForce on AMD in general) they're very quirky and often far behind. A good Intel chipset is far more stable.

I did quite enjoy my Nforce 3 and Nforce 4 chipsets, Nvidia had an excellent chipset, though I will admit that intel does make better chipsets, just back then they couldn't make a good cpu. It wasn't just the preformance either, it was the fact that the platform was cheaper thanks to DDR/AGP vs DDR2/PCIe, preformed better in games and multimedia consumption, ran cooler, and honestly because it had Nforce 4/5 that worked 100%, while the intel nforce chipsets where flaky until Nforce 6 and SLi was unrealiable on the intel side.

Yeah I'm not sure why anyone would have gone with a non-Intel chipset if purchasing a P4. Or with any other Intel CPU after 486, for that matter.

nForce4 was nice. Though my experience with it initially was a BIOS that was unstable at default because DFI had excessively aggressive default RAM timings (!) and the NVIDIA Firewall (Network Access Manager) that came with the chipset drivers corrupted all of my downloads until I figured out it was the cause. I'm not sure they ever dropped that Firewall software from their drivers and it was never a solid piece of software AFAIK. It was an optional install but unless you know it is bad news why would you not install it?

I'm pretty sure a lot of Vista's problems were caused by these crappy chipsets. In particular, NVidia's shoddy drivers that crashed (like the firewall) and the dreadful IGPs (worse than GMA) on most that chugged in Aero. The Core 2 era were the last of the third-party chipsets, bar stragglers like the Nehalem/Westmere nForce chipsets. You usually only saw those on LGA2011 stuff or MacBooks, and the latter are very fickle about RAM because of it.

I do have a P3 (P3 500, so slot 1, and with AGP 2X) with a nice Aladdin chipset though. Not too flaky.

candle_86 wrote:

calvin wrote:

To be fair, P4s generally had better chipsets. I've dealt with SiS/ATI/NVidia/Via chipsets, (SiS on Intel and nForce on AMD in general) they're very quirky and often far behind. A good Intel chipset is far more stable.

I did quite enjoy my Nforce 3 and Nforce 4 chipsets, Nvidia had an excellent chipset, though I will admit that intel does make better chipsets, just back then they couldn't make a good cpu. It wasn't just the preformance either, it was the fact that the platform was cheaper thanks to DDR/AGP vs DDR2/PCIe, preformed better in games and multimedia consumption, ran cooler, and honestly because it had Nforce 4/5 that worked 100%, while the intel nforce chipsets where flaky until Nforce 6 and SLi was unrealiable on the intel side.

Well thats perhaps somewhat true for a very specific period of time.

i915 was pretty sucky, early boards diddnt overclock very well and DDR2 was expensive etc etc, but socket 478 was still selling and 865PE came as socket 775 aswell.

Aside from your comment that the boards do not overclock well, what was crummy about i915 boards compared to i865 and i875? All the i915/i875/i865 boards on my list use DDR1.

It's an early DDR2/PCIe/Prescott board. Solid, but inferior compared to the later 945/965.

Skyscraper wrote:

Perhaps people will find the need for very very fast Windows 98 systems 😀

True that. And you never know... P4 motherboard systems will dominate in W98 driver support - P4 is the bastard child but when they've all been recycled as predicted who's to say what will happen? I'm already on board.

candle_86 wrote:

I dont need to run my own tests when every review ever done supports my claims, but your just some fan boy, you struck a nerve because my tolerance for what I consider idiots is being tried by you. I have zero tolerance for self righteous fanboys. You ignore evidence and you make false assumptions yet provide no proof for those assumptions, had this been a regulated debate you'd have lost. Please stop speaking until you are able to extract your head from your ass.

Guys, he's just trolling you. He likes to make statements that make no sense and gets a kick out of your reactions. Just check his YT video with him running around the city with a ghetto blaster.

https://youtu.be/d6bSpibny-Y?t=2m22s

Don't feed the troll. Just ignore him.

My view on A64 vs Pentium 4. While A64 is faster for gaming, I prefer working with Intel gear. I also find Intel gear cheaper and easier to find. The Intel chipsets are solid and Intel P4 gear is simply very easy to work with.

There is a lot of P4 gear out there, but decent A64 gear is much harder to find. The performance difference might have been an issue back in the day, but these days it's not. If we need something faster, we just with a Core 2 Duo or Athlon II 😀

swaaye wrote:

Yeah I'm not sure why anyone would have gone with a non-Intel chipset if purchasing a P4. Or with any other Intel CPU after 486, for that matter.

nForce4 was nice. Though my experience with it initially was a BIOS that was unstable at default because DFI had excessively aggressive default RAM timings (!) and the NVIDIA Firewall (Network Access Manager) that came with the chipset drivers corrupted all of my downloads until I figured out it was the cause. I'm not sure they ever dropped that Firewall software from their drivers and it was never a solid piece of software AFAIK. It was an optional install but unless you know it is bad news why would you not install it?

well you would have for SLI or crossfire. Remember Intel didn't have support for crossfire until 965P and SLI wasn't offically part of the chipset support until P67, P55 and X58 got SLI because they had the nforce 200 chip onboard to support SLI. So for any high end gaming rig you had to use a diffrent chipset and considering Nvidia had the stronger multi gpu implementation until about 2008 you wanted nforce for the best possible experince as far as gaming goes, and for that matter CAD/3d work as well, as Intel chipsets of the P4 era if they had mutli pcie slots it was a 16x, a 4x and 2 1x slots at best.

Candle_86, the 955, 965, and 975 all support CrossFire, and ATI released 775 chipsets too. They are not all 16+4 either, and many boards will support 2x8 or 16+8. CrossFire with R600+(Radeon 2900) was very very flexible (the X1950Pro also uses the internal bridges, and some lesser X-series cards run bridgeless CF), moreso than SLI (e.g. mis-matched cards, 2-4 cards, etc), and is supported on a number of platforms (P4 is one of them). That started to roll out around 2005-6 with the X1950 and HD 2900 cards. First gen CrossFire (that uses Master cards) is, IME, also much nicer to live with than NV40/G70 solutions. Also, SLI is largely unimportant for CAD/CAM, and Quadro SLI is only available to certified partners (eg Dell). AFAIK nobody has yet cracked the Quadro SLI ROM either. On the first-gen with the Master card and pass-thru, it has always supported switching CF on and off without a reboot (older nVidia drivers will not allow this), and SuperAA + TAA are very attractive too. The resolution limit on the X850s is probably the only downside to those specific cards, but that was eliminated with the X1800s.

Furthermore, SLI nor CF is really requisite for gaming, IMHO, when "looking backwards." What I mean is, instead of having a pair of X850s or 7800GTXs or whatever, you could just pick a newer and faster single-card solution like an 8800GTX or HD 4850 or some-such and only require a single PCIe x16 slot from the system. All of the DX10 cards, and many DX11 cards, have drivers for Windows XP at least, and could make for an interesting build around a P4 with PCIe (basically decent single core performance + excellent graphics quality/performance; you could of course use any other fast CPU, like Athlon64 FX, if you like).

EDIT to add some more information (and improved clarity above):

The 955X (Apr 2005) supports 16+4, the 975 (Nov 2005) supports 16+8, the P965 (June 2006) supports 16+4. For ATi, there's the Xpress 3200 for Intel (Sep 2006) which supports 2x8 as well (and IME the ATi chispets, while not the fastest performers, actually tended to be fairly stable platforms).

All of these should support CrossFire with Pentium 4 or Pentium D, assuming the motherboard implements/enables/etc everything correctly. SLI is supported on the Intel nForce chipsets, which IME were a mixed bag. AFAIK there's no issues going backwards/forwards with CrossFire using Master cards and CrossFire X (which uses the internal bridges) - I've successfully run CrossFire with a Master card on an X48, and have seen systems that use internal bridging running on Xpress 200 CrossFire (the original CF chipset for X850).

I used a 478 matx MSI board with one of the lga775 VIA chipsets with AGP/DDR and found it to be really trouble free. No bugs detecting hard drives, no data corruption, 0 driver issues and even the onboard VIA lan/audio worked great. Now the Monochrome graphics onboard were laughable, but who needs that when you have agp 8x? 😁

This brings back memories. Back in the day I joined a Quake clan online and when I went to a LAN with these guys I found that I was the only Intel-user there.... I always liked my Pentium rigs though and never saw reason to change. The Nvidia vs ATI argument was more important anyway.

obobskivich wrote:

Candle_86, the 955, 965, and 975 all support CrossFire, and ATI released 775 chipsets too. They are not all 16+4 either, and man […]
Show full quote

Candle_86, the 955, 965, and 975 all support CrossFire, and ATI released 775 chipsets too. They are not all 16+4 either, and many boards will support 2x8 or 16+8. CrossFire with R600+(Radeon 2900) was very very flexible (the X1950Pro also uses the internal bridges, and some lesser X-series cards run bridgeless CF), moreso than SLI (e.g. mis-matched cards, 2-4 cards, etc), and is supported on a number of platforms (P4 is one of them). That started to roll out around 2005-6 with the X1950 and HD 2900 cards. First gen CrossFire (that uses Master cards) is, IME, also much nicer to live with than NV40/G70 solutions. Also, SLI is largely unimportant for CAD/CAM, and Quadro SLI is only available to certified partners (eg Dell). AFAIK nobody has yet cracked the Quadro SLI ROM either. On the first-gen with the Master card and pass-thru, it has always supported switching CF on and off without a reboot (older nVidia drivers will not allow this), and SuperAA + TAA are very attractive too. The resolution limit on the X850s is probably the only downside to those specific cards, but that was eliminated with the X1800s.

Furthermore, SLI nor CF is really requisite for gaming, IMHO, when "looking backwards." What I mean is, instead of having a pair of X850s or 7800GTXs or whatever, you could just pick a newer and faster single-card solution like an 8800GTX or HD 4850 or some-such and only require a single PCIe x16 slot from the system. All of the DX10 cards, and many DX11 cards, have drivers for Windows XP at least, and could make for an interesting build around a P4 with PCIe (basically decent single core performance + excellent graphics quality/performance; you could of course use any other fast CPU, like Athlon64 FX, if you like).

EDIT to add some more information (and improved clarity above):

The 955X (Apr 2005) supports 16+4, the 975 (Nov 2005) supports 16+8, the P965 (June 2006) supports 16+4. For ATi, there's the Xpress 3200 for Intel (Sep 2006) which supports 2x8 as well (and IME the ATi chispets, while not the fastest performers, actually tended to be fairly stable platforms).

All of these should support CrossFire with Pentium 4 or Pentium D, assuming the motherboard implements/enables/etc everything correctly. SLI is supported on the Intel nForce chipsets, which IME were a mixed bag. AFAIK there's no issues going backwards/forwards with CrossFire using Master cards and CrossFire X (which uses the internal bridges) - I've successfully run CrossFire with a Master card on an X48, and have seen systems that use internal bridging running on Xpress 200 CrossFire (the original CF chipset for X850).

yes im aware of the older crossfire, but 16+4 was not a good method for crossfire, it might have been fine for the x850, but considering that by the time crossfire was readily available the x1800XT was almost ready to go was largely ignored, because the 7800GTX was out and offered more performance. But to continue the x850 could saturate an AGP4x bus and showed improved speed on AGP 8x, and considering PCIe 1.0/1.1 4x operates @ 1gb/s which is the same speed as AGP 4x it's sufficent to rule out any 16x4 solutions, meaning for pentium 4 no real viable crossfire solution besides ATI's own existed, and the express 1150 aka express 200 was even more buggy than nforce 4 on intel it really pushed anyone wanting to play at the highend to AMD. As for the argument agasint SLI/Xfire, I've ran it quite a few times on current gen hardware.

2007 HD3870+HD3850 crossfire (preformed terribly, I lost preformance in most games, and the gpu's where paired with an Athlon 64 X2 6000)

2011 GTX 560 Ti 448 SLI (ran wonderfully, no issues paired with i5 2500k)

2012 GTX 670 Triple SLI (ran wonderfully, paired with i7 3930k{had to sell this machine when I was out of work for 4 months})

Each one but the crossfire worked wonderfully, and if you bought multi gpu when current it made alot of sense. to run at 1200p in 2004 you needed SLI, to run at 1600p you had to have SLI/Crossfire in 2006, and today nothing can drive a game at 4k outside of SLI.

feipoa wrote:

Aside from your comment that the boards do not overclock well, what was crummy about i915 boards compared to i865 and i875? All the i915/i875/i865 boards on my list use DDR1.

Nah they are probably OK, Im just butthurt over the fact that Intel made them bad overclockers on purpose.
As you say i915 supports DDR1 aswell and you can even find bords that supports both types of memory.

Don't i915 boards support some socket 775 core 2 duo chips? In that sense, wouldn't the i915 boards be better in terms of speed compared to the i865/i875 boards? If so, and if I had to select the two best motherboards from the list for everyday web browsing and other day-to-day usage, wouldn't the Asus P5GL-MX (i915 w/PCIe x16) and the SuperMicro H8SSL-R10 (ServerWorks HT1000 with dual core Opteron 185) be the best choices?

I am still using a dual PIII Tualatin for my day-to-day computer needs. I figure it does'nt have much time left for such usage. I salvaged the two least ugly desktop towers from that lot, so I have space for 2 motherboards. I am not sure if the SiS 661FX chipsets support core 2 duo, but the boards in my possession are limited to 2 GB.

Based on the overwhelming number of responses, I have decided to trash 24 of the boards on the list.