128MB/256MB PC800 RDRAM seems to be cheap and relatively plentiful.

But CPU wise, the Northwood is significantly faster than Willamette for gaming. For general tasks, it's just slightly faster. So from feasibility point of view, it's not great. Also, Intel did make 478 Willamettes, so you could directly compare the two on a 478 system.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/866/3

Think about Pentium 4 Willy as Northwood version of Celeron D with 400MHz FSB.

As long as you avoid the P4 1.3 and 1.4 the performance is good enough for year 1999 to 2002 stuff, the Willamette 1.9 and 2.0 extends the usable range up to year 2003 games.

Some newer stuff also works decently. I tested to play the original World of Warcraft using an Asus P4T system with a slightly overclocked P4 2.0 GHz and a Geforce 6600GT and it has worked fine when playng at 1280*1024 with all settings maxed out.

You'll have a hard time finding a socket 423 mainboard. If you plan to build such a machine, I suggest you start with the mainboard, since CPUs can be found pretty easily.

Thank you all for the information; so that puts the performance of Willamette in between Pentium 3 Tualatin and athlon thunderbird. Here are the motherboards i'm looking at.

If you want to generalize then Willamette P4 2.0 = Athlon Thunderbird 1400 = Tualatin Pentium IIII 1.4-S. All three CPUs were released at about the same time* and performed about the same on average.

*The somewhat slower Tualatin P-III-S 1.26GHz model were released at about the same time with the 1.4GHZ model coming a few months later but all the three competing CPU cores performed about the same when overclocked.

The i850 chipset with RDRAM and AMD760 or VIA KT266A with DDR are much better chipsets than i815 though (at least for W2K and XP). The i820 chipset is somewhat nice but has other drawbacks like few good Tualatin capable motherboard models and the price, avoid i820 boards with SDRAM as they are dog slow. With the Tualatin VIA chipsets are probably your best bet.

In general I see the Tualatin as a good Win9x CPU but the Willamette P4 and Athlon Thunderbird wins out in Windows 2000 and XP because of better platforms.

Edit spelling

Skyscraper wrote:

In general I see the Tualatin as a good Win9x CPU but the Willamette P4 and Athlon Thunderbird wins out in Windows 2000 and XP because of better platforms.

Apart from the max 512MB limit of i815, how is the Tualatin platform disadvantaged for NT5 compared to i850 and the Thunderbird platforms?
In my experience XP ran pretty much fine on any i815 board I installed it on (though most of these were not Tualatins but Coppermines, but the chipsets used are veeery similar).

Or are you referring to the newer sA DDR platforms, which Thunderbirds are compatible with?

Tualatin had VIA Apollo Pro 266 though: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ddr-pentium-iii,316.html

Tetrium wrote:

Apart from the max 512MB limit of i815, how is the Tualatin platform disadvantaged for NT5 compared to i850 and the Thunderbird […]
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Skyscraper wrote:

In general I see the Tualatin as a good Win9x CPU but the Willamette P4 and Athlon Thunderbird wins out in Windows 2000 and XP because of better platforms.

Apart from the max 512MB limit of i815, how is the Tualatin platform disadvantaged for NT5 compared to i850 and the Thunderbird platforms?
In my experience XP ran pretty much fine on any i815 board I installed it on (though most of these were not Tualatins but Coppermines, but the chipsets used are veeery similar).

Or are you referring to the newer sA DDR platforms, which Thunderbirds are compatible with?

Beeing limited to 512MB memory is my main gripe with i815 but beeing SDR is also a disadvantage. Both AMD 760 and VIA KT266A are DDR platforms and i850 with RDRAM is really nice eventhough I totally understand the dislike for the expensive memory back then.

Upper end Socket A, Socket 423 and early Socket 478 motherboards also often have the adavantage of nice extra features such as raid controllers. With Socket A and Socket 478 there is also the possability to switch to a faster CPU should the need arise. The Palomino 2100+ should work on all AMD 760 and KT266A motherboards and the P4 2.8(A) should work on most i850 motherboards, even the Socket 423 ones using an adapter.

It's not really that i815 motherboards are bad but I do not really think you get much for the money you spend. If you are bulding a kickass Pentum III Win9x build then buying an Asus Tusl2-C motherboard costing $60 to $80 and a Tualatin Pentium III-S 1400 costing $20 perhaps makes sense. If I would be building a year 2001 system to run early XP stuff I rather spend much less on a VIA KT266A motherboard and an Athlon Thunderbird 1400 or Palomino Athlon XP 1900+. The intel i850 option isn't as cheap but sometimes bargins can be made. 😀

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Tualatin had VIA Apollo Pro 266 though: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ddr-pentium-iii,316.html

If you are willing to give up a kidney then yes, VIA Apollo 266 is an option. 😀

Skyscraper wrote:

If you are willing to give up a kidney then yes, VIA Apollo 266 is an option.

That's only ebay problem probably. Just need to look for them locally.

i do have multiples systems around here, a Tualatin/i815/SDR system (GA-6OXT), a Willamette/i850/RDRAM system (ECS P4ITA), a Willamette/i845/SDR system (QDI Platinix 2A) and an Thoroughbred/SiS 735/DDR system (ECS K7S5A), also an Thunderbird/VIA KT133/SDR system, all of them runs Windows XP without any issues despite some of the shortcommings in some system like the SDR RAM in both Tualatin and one of the P4 systems

I have more spares mobos for other combos i can mess with someday like VIA KT333 (MSI KT3 Ultra2), VIA 694T (QDI Advance 10T), SiS 645 (QDI Superb 4), SiS 645DX (ECS P4S5A/DX+, Fujitsu Siemens D1495), Intel 845E (ASUS P4B533, Dell Dimension 4500)... etc

Socket 423 has it's shortcommings, but is not that bad, maybe the slowest P4s are below the fatest P3s, but a fast Socket 423 P4 copuled with Rambus doesn't have to be bad, it can compare with some Tualatins or Athlons at some point, although Socket 423 was short lived and got replaced quickly with Socket 478 later

Socket 423 isn't limited to 2ghz

https://www.amazon.com/Upgradeware-Upgrade-Ad … p/dp/B004HAXLUU

If you can find one cheap enough 🤣

candle_86 wrote:

Socket 423 isn't limited to 2ghz

https://www.amazon.com/Upgradeware-Upgrade-Ad … p/dp/B004HAXLUU

If you can find one cheap enough 🤣

😀