Newbie here, my Pentium 2 system lasted from around 1997 to 2006. I was born in 94 (my dad was awesome!) Until my motherboard caught on fire. I swear that thing ran ever thing! I put the 32mb all in wonder card in my Pentium 4 replacement I got in 2011 (went with out a pc until then!!!) and i can vouch for that sluggish p4 feeling. Running a am3+ 990fx board with 4gb of ram and a Athlon iix2 i got for free now! felt nostalgic and bought a gigabyte 440bx board for $10 and i swear it still runs faster than the p4.

The strange thing is, I remember upgrading from a Pentium III 700 to a 2.4GHz Pentium IV Prescott around 2005, and in many ways it actually seemed like a massive improvement. Granted, it started feeling sluggish when I actually decided to connect it to the internet and install SP3 and whatnot, but before then when it was offline and running SP2 it actually felt like a pretty decent machine.

I think its my hard drive, still have both machines. Old 400gb ibm deskstar ide drive. im swapping it out for a wd 80gb just to see what kind of performance gains I get. That and my buddy was telling me that my install of xp might be messed up :p it has a NVidia 6600 in it now and iv always felt like with 3gb tri channel ddr266 it should be faster than it is.

God, how can anyone say a 700 Mhz Pentium III is better than a Pentium 4? Why do the people hate the Pentium 4 so much anyways? Yeah, it needed more than 2 Ghz to really shine, but it did achieve the performance. I played through Oblivion and Morrowind on a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 rig, it rocked, and I had it connected to the internet and it was very fast until the hard drive died on me (but then, the HDD of my current i7 rig died yesterday and I'm posting this from a netbook, it is almost an unlucky rule for me that when I have a good PC, it's HDD will invariably die a horrible, early death).

Anyways, in my opinion the early to mid 2000s were in fact the best times for computing. End of properiatery APIs, PC graphics surpassed the consoles greatly, high resolutions became the norm, GPU memory grew from 8 MB to 128 MB, CPUs provided true, raw performance as opposed to multicore/"64-bit" bullshit that only a few new games can use and introduces countless incompatibilities (you have to do ini tweaks nowadays just to play Fallout 3, a 2008 game, because it freezes up on CPUs with more than 2 cores on default settings). Yeah the NetBurst architecture was not elegant or whatever, but it delivered the performance. If someone told my 11 year old self that after 10 years most processors will still max out at 3.2 Ghz I'd freaking cry.

I'm sorry if this disturbs anyone's Pentium II/Voodoo 2 romanticism or adorement of 2 Ghz CPUs with 4 cores (I don't want more cores damn it, give me performance).

By the way, my former Pentium 4 PC is still in use in my mother's office, I just used it yesterday, and it is still fast (through I obviously didn't play games on it now, its a work PC now after all).

Why do the people hate the Pentium 4 so much anyways?

MegaHz myth. The Athlon XP was better per cycle and per watt.

If someone told my 11 year old self that after 10 years most processors will still max out at 3.2 Ghz I'd freaking cry.

An i7 MHz does a lot more than a p4 MHz.

Yes it does. But how much of that i7s Mhz requires a game/application to be written for multicore support? And how many people are willing to mess with affinity settings just to play a 5 year old game? I am not saying having red hot 6 Ghz CPUs is the answers, merely that the IT people should have focused on making single or double core CPUs faster and more efficient. Pentium 4 threw gigahertz at things until they went away, today's CPUs are making the same mistake but with multicoreness. They should stop making octacore CPUs and make a CPU that can actually be utilized by 90 percent of applications.

Athlon XPs were more powerful than Pentium 4s per clock, but that does not make the Pentium 4 a bad chip. The AMD K5 was more powerful per clock too yet Pentium steamrolled it by sheer Mhz. I am not saying Pentium 4 steamrolled the Athlon XP, but saying how early 2000s were a crap era for computers or that Pentiums 4 are the "work of the devil" (literally said by one user in a discussion about a P4 desktop) is just STUPID.

Besides, saying stuff like "megahertz myth" makes you seem like a 1990s Apple fanboy.

Anyways, a 2004 Pentium 4 is gonna steamroll a 700 Mhz Pentium III any day simply by being way faster. Athlon XP being better than Pentium 4 does not make the Pentium 4 "shit" in any way.

As for me and my subjective experience, the only Pentium 4 I used had a nice Geforce 6600 card in it and the only Athlon XPs I used were school computers with rage inducing Intel GMA950 graphics, so my judgement is biased, but give me a Pentium 4 with a Geforce any day over any AthlonXP or Core2Duo with an "Intel Graphics Multimedia Accelerator". If I had to choose between those and a 1997 vintage Voodoo 1 rig, I'd take the Voodoo rig in a heartbeat. If any computers are really the devil, the Intel graphics PCs would be that.

m1so wrote:

Yes it does. But how much of that i7s Mhz requires a game/application to be written for multicore support?

It doesn't really. i7 is per clock per core still a lot faster than p4. However, designing a multicore app yields even more performance...

m1so wrote:

And how many people are willing to mess with affinity settings just to play a 5 year old game?

True, that is a problem. The same as Speedstep and cool'n'quiet...some games unfortunately do not cope with that. The same as old dx and new graphics...one could however disable extra cores in the bios if needed 😁

m1so wrote:

I am not saying having red hot 6 Ghz CPUs is the answers, merely that the IT people should have focused on making single or double core CPUs faster and more efficient. Pentium 4 threw gigahertz at things until they went away, today's CPUs are making the same mistake but with multicoreness.

I wouldn't call that a mistake. P4 was built from the ground up to be clocked high. But they hit a wall at 4GHz. You can't change the laws of physics, it was simply not possible to go above that (with sufficient air cooling and stability). They said Netburst would go to 10GHz...when they figured it wouldn't, they went back to the drawing board finding an alternative solution to increase performance...

But how much of that i7s Mhz requires a game/application to be written for multicore support?

Even single threaded software will run faster on a 3ghz i7 than a 3ghz P4. Try running SuperPi on your P4 and your i7 and see the difference.

Athlon XP being better than Pentium 4 does not make the Pentium 4 "shit" in any way.

True, but I know which one I want in my collection.

I know even single threaded software will run faster, but it still cannot adress even 1/4 of the i7s potential. This is why the Sega Saturn got defeated by Sony Playstation - powerful single core has beaten a dual CPU architecture.

I guess what I am truly lamenting about is the hideous state of stagnation computers have been in since 2005 or so. An i7 from 2013 is much more powerful than a Pentium 4 from 2004 yes, but the gulf between a 2004 Pentium 4 and a 1995 Pentium 66 Mhz is far greater, and this applies even more when comparing whole computers, graphical quality of games etc. A 2004 game is far more like an 2013 game than a 1995 game.

Uhm, in 1995 the Pentium was already up to 133MHz.
For completeness, in 2004 the Pentium 4 was up to Pentium 4 HT 570J (3800MHz, socket 775)
With Core i7, Haswell just entered the scene.

And the performance difference comparison between Pentium and Pentium 4 versus Pentium 4 and Core i7 is NOT a fair one due to the earlier stated megahertz-myth. Focus shifted from doing a task quickly (megahertz) to doing several tasks at once quickly (multitasking).

Run 100 task on a Pentium 4 and the same tasks on a Haswell i7 and you'll see the same difference as when you compare a single task between a Pentium and Pentium 4.

133 Mhz was ridiculously expensive. Most people were still stuck with 33 Mhz 486s. And my point stands, the progress in computers in the last decade was small compared to the 1990s.

See I have also not used any of the "Good" Pentium 4's. My experience is limited to a 533fsb with no hyperthreading. I have seen late 478 and 775 rigs that are pretty snappy. The difference between a single i5 or i7 core and a single Pentium 4 core is still huge imho.

m1so wrote:

God, how can anyone say a 700 Mhz Pentium III is better than a Pentium 4? Why do the people hate the Pentium 4 so much anyways? […]
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God, how can anyone say a 700 Mhz Pentium III is better than a Pentium 4? Why do the people hate the Pentium 4 so much anyways? Yeah, it needed more than 2 Ghz to really shine, but it did achieve the performance. I played through Oblivion and Morrowind on a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 rig, it rocked, and I had it connected to the internet and it was very fast until the hard drive died on me (but then, the HDD of my current i7 rig died yesterday and I'm posting this from a netbook, it is almost an unlucky rule for me that when I have a good PC, it's HDD will invariably die a horrible, early death).

Anyways, in my opinion the early to mid 2000s were in fact the best times for computing. End of properiatery APIs, PC graphics surpassed the consoles greatly, high resolutions became the norm, GPU memory grew from 8 MB to 128 MB, CPUs provided true, raw performance as opposed to multicore/"64-bit" bullshit that only a few new games can use and introduces countless incompatibilities (you have to do ini tweaks nowadays just to play Fallout 3, a 2008 game, because it freezes up on CPUs with more than 2 cores on default settings). Yeah the NetBurst architecture was not elegant or whatever, but it delivered the performance. If someone told my 11 year old self that after 10 years most processors will still max out at 3.2 Ghz I'd freaking cry.

I'm sorry if this disturbs anyone's Pentium II/Voodoo 2 romanticism or adorement of 2 Ghz CPUs with 4 cores (I don't want more cores damn it, give me performance).

By the way, my former Pentium 4 PC is still in use in my mother's office, I just used it yesterday, and it is still fast (through I obviously didn't play games on it now, its a work PC now after all).

I never said my Pentium III was better, I actually said it was worse than my Pentium 4.

ODwilly wrote:

See I have also not used any of the "Good" Pentium 4's. My experience is limited to a 533fsb with no hyperthreading. I have seen late 478 and 775 rigs that are pretty snappy. The difference between a single i5 or i7 core and a single Pentium 4 core is still huge imho.

Obviously the difference is big, it would be shameful if 10 years brought no increase in CPU power, the problem is, the difference is smaller than if you compare Pentium 4 to say the Pentium I. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the usual amount of RAM would quadraple each 2-3 years, comparably, the development of PCs today is at a standstill.

As for multitasking, I regularly browsed with dozens of tabs on my Pentium 4 rig, with antivirus turned on and MS Word running simultaniously, with mp3 playing in the background. As for running actually demanding 100 applications at once, who the hell does that? I still had to exit every background application to keep my minimum FPS above 20 in Bioshock Infinity on my i7 rig. To me this "focus on multitasking" seems more like an excuse to not tell "we cannot really provide much more raw power anymore with our current technology".

m1so wrote:

God, how can anyone say a 700 Mhz Pentium III is better than a Pentium 4?

That's not far from the truth with the first Willamettes, that were just smoke and mirrors.

My 440BX PIII Tualatin-S @ 1.6 beats a Northwood 2.8 in some tasks.

That said, I have a 3.4HT Preshott that is quite faster than the Tually, and miles faster once OCed above 4GHz.

m1so wrote:

... Why do the people hate the Pentium 4 so much anyways?

I'd bet ineficciency, expressed as draw from the wall, heat, and (with standard cooler) noise.

Believe it or not, at full burner the above single-core Preshott draws the same (~310W) @ 4.25 than a six-core Phenom II @ 4.1 😵 . You can't get much more inefficient than this 🤣 .

m1so wrote:

... If someone told my 11 year old self that after 10 years most processors will still max out at 3.2 Ghz I'd freaking cry ...

We hit the harsh realities of physics (heat wall) around the middle of the past decade. That obstacle stopped the frontal assault (GHz race) and left only available the pincer movement (multi-core, parallelism).

Guess if someone had told them in 1960 that supersonic fighters' top speed would still be ~Mach 2.2 in the XXI century (another example of heat wall) they would have cried too 😀 .

m1so wrote:

... I guess what I am truly lamenting about is the hideous state of stagnation computers have been in since 2005 or so ...

Wholly agreed.

I'm seeing people in forums saying that after watching what the current (2013) bleeding edge (Haswell) has to offer, they see no reason to upgrade from their 5 year old Q9550.

Can you imagine in the year 2000 someone with a 1995 Pentium P54C 120 saying 'meh, I see no reason for upgrading to a PIII Coppermine 1000'? 🤣

TELVM wrote:

We hit the harsh realities of physics (heat wall) around the middle of the past decade. That obstacle stopped the frontal assaul […]
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m1so wrote:

... If someone told my 11 year old self that after 10 years most processors will still max out at 3.2 Ghz I'd freaking cry ...

We hit the harsh realities of physics (heat wall) around the middle of the past decade. That obstacle stopped the frontal assault (GHz race) and left only available the pincer movement (multi-core, parallelism).

Guess if someone had told them in 1960 that supersonic fighters' top speed would still be ~Mach 2.2 in the XXI century (another example of heat wall) they would have cried too 😀 .

m1so wrote:

... I guess what I am truly lamenting about is the hideous state of stagnation computers have been in since 2005 or so ...

Wholly agreed.

I'm seeing people in forums saying that after watching what the current (2013) bleeding edge (Haswell) has to offer, they see no reason to upgrade from their 5 year old Q9550.

Can you imagine in the year 2000 someone with a 1995 Pentium P54C 120 saying 'meh, I see no reason for upgrading to a PIII Coppermine 1000'? 🤣

This is what I'm talking about. There is also the thing that any 2003 PC, even the lowliest piece of lowend shit will run a 1994 game absolutely comfortably (as long as the game is not so bound to CPU speed and thus will run too fast). On the other hand, I just installed NFSU: 2 on a friends 2 year old laptop, and I had to set it below native resolution snd turn all settings way down to get it playing at over 35 fps. Worse, when I put Dethcarz from 1998 on his PC, it LAGGED at the max settings. I think the worst part of modern computing is the abundance of computers that are too new to run old classic games, but too shitty to run anything made after 2004. I'd honestly prefer an old, secondhand PC to one of those crap "value" computers.

By the way, the Pentium 4 I had was a 3.2 Ghz Northwood, with HyperThreading, and as I said, it ran everything I threw on it well until the hard drive failed. And it was still quieter than my i7 rig.

Part of the reason is also the wide(r) spread of consoles and shifting the focus of game development away from PC. A game has to run on (and perhaps even targeted for) an almost 7 year old console(s). It's like having a '97 game (well into the Voodoo era) targeted for Sega Mega Drive or SNES.

gulikoza wrote:

Part of the reason is also the wide(r) spread of consoles and shifting the focus of game development away from PC. A game has to run on (and perhaps even targeted for) an almost 7 year old console(s). It's like having a '97 game (well into the Voodoo era) targeted for Sega Mega Drive or SNES.

Honestly, I won't blame it on the consoles, as most 1990s titles were on the Playstation and N64 as well.

Besides, the average PC STILL STRUGGLES to run games made after 2007-2008 and I'm being charitable here. That is, even with consoles supposedly slowing down technological development in games. The games being multiplatform is not the problem, the sluggish development of PC hardware and the spread of pieces of shit that are barely adequate to view funny pics on the internet is.

And yet, these 7 year old consoles still run these games better than current low end PCs. Most people I know can only dream about i7.

My system is from November 2008 (Pentium E5200, 2GiB, Radeon HD4670 512MiB GDDR3). I've played Farcry 2, Crysis and several other newer games on it without any problems. The only game that did give me problems was GTA IV and the reason for that is because it's a crappy port. All other major graphics engines run without a problem.

Your system is better than anyone who I know excluding myself and another guy I know.