Skyscraper wrote:

The next project after this will be to build a 2001 Socket-A system to really see what would have been the best buy 2001 😀.

Ah, I'm working on this very soon as well 😀

I found the following issues with a Socket A system:

- Most systems are 5V heavy, making it hard to find a good, modern PSU. P4 used the 12V 4 pin connector, which makes it easy
- No SSE2 which means many software won't work, including Steam, which is a huge blow for me as I have a lot of great Windows XP games on Steam
- Got to be careful with mounting the cooler and not chip the processor

But I think I'm looking at a time after 2001 if I'm honest. For Windows 98, I feel all the platforms are very good.

A 2001 Athlon has no SSE at all.

Argon/Pluto/Orion and Thunderbird are SSEless.

matze79 wrote:

A 2001 Athlon has no SSE at all.

Argon/Pluto/Orion and Thunderbird are SSEless.

Yea I used a newer one.

matze79 wrote:

A 2001 Athlon has no SSE at all.

Argon/Pluto/Orion and Thunderbird are SSEless.

The Palomino Athlon XP do have SSE and its from 2001! 😀

From Late 2001, October

matze79 wrote:

From Late 2001, October

Which makes it perfect for my 2001 platform comparison as the first affordable Intel chipset P4 platform the i845 is from September 2001 and I do believe that the Tualatin-S with 512kb cache also is from the third quarter of 2001.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Cool, thanks for the info. One of my cases came with a PSU, which seems to be an "older design". It has 28A for the 5V rail with a 220W max rating for combined 5V and 3.3V. It should be enough and it's better than anything else I got.

I have an old e-Machines box that came stock with an Athlon XP 2400+. The stock PS has 30A on the +5v rail.

I also had an old Gateway with an Athlon XP 3800+ that developed bad caps. Its stock PS also had 30A on the +5v rail. I would have thought that this mobo would have powered the CPU with +12v. However, there may have been a P4 type plug, but I just recycled the mobo and can't check. I'm glad I saved the PS because my next build is a Win98SE Athlon XP system with ISA.

I bought a broken Microsoft SideWinder Precision Pro and cleaned my EPoX EP-3BXA Socket 370 motherboard.

Im benching the P4B system now, the Willamette is total junk 😁. I had forgot just how slow they are.

A P4 1.7 with 133 MHz SDR memory is slow, at 2000 MHz with the memory at 118 MHz its even slower. A P4 1.9 @ 2.2 with the memory at 116 MHz just barely beats the P4 1.7 with the memory at 133MHz.

The latest non beta BIOS would not let me run the memory with 3:4 FSB:Memory ratio other than at 100 MHz FSB but I found a beta BIOS with more options... At 2200 MHz with the memory at 155 MHz the P4 Willamette 1.9 is still much slower than the Tualatin at 1575 Mhz. It is in fact so much slower that I dare say when it comes to gaming not even a cherry picked and watercooled P4 Willamette 2.0 @ 2.5 with SDR memory at 166 Mhz would come close to the Tualatin @ 1575 with SDR memory at 150 MHz. With the i850 chipset and RDRAM the results would of course be somewhat different.

Im not even going to bother to find a better CPU than this P4 1.9 although Im sure I have a few Willamettes 2.0 somewhere, at least this CPU only needs 1.8V for 2.2 GHz. I have also tried 3x P4 1.7 and a P4 1.6, all of them needed 2.0 - 2.1V to be stable at 2.2 Ghz.

I have also found an irritating issue with my Asus P4B, the socket "pins" dosnt make very good contact with the CPU pins so if I happen to touch the heatsink I often have to reseat the CPU.

I recently built a D850GB Willamette P4 1.7ghz just FOR that 2000-ish system bottleneck. Geforce2 GTS, Live 5.1 and Windows Me 😀 and to even further down the bottleneck i'm using older Detonators before they really improved the performance on the GF2. I even let the Live crapware take over the computer, Playcenter, Launcher and all, helps give it that kitschy Dot Bomb feel 😀

It is indeed torture though, crashes left and right!! Convinced it may be IDE controller related.
Also Maxwurf it's slow in 1600x1200 😀

leileilol wrote:

Windows Me

leileilol wrote:

crashes left and right

There's your problem. 😀 Brave soul!

leileilol wrote:

I recently built a D850GB Willamette P4 1.7ghz just FOR that 2000-ish system bottleneck. Geforce2 GTS, Live 5.1 and Windows Me 😀 and to even further down the bottleneck i'm using older Detonators before they really improved the performance on the GF2. I even let the Live crapware take over the computer, Playcenter, Launcher and all, helps give it that kitschy Dot Bomb feel 😀

It is indeed torture though, crashes left and right!! Convinced it may be IDE controller related.
Also Maxwurf it's slow in 1600x1200 😀

I bought a Dell Dimension 8100 with the i850 chipset and a socket 423 Willamette P4 for a few euro, I have not had (read made) time to try it out yet. I hope that the memory bandwidth will make it less horrible than the i845 chipset with SDR memory 😁. Sadly i lost a bidding war for a socket 423 P4 2.0. The fastest one I have is a P4 1.7 but who knows whats inside the Dimension 8100... probably a P4 1.4 or 1.5 😜

I managed to get the i845 system with a Willamette P4 1.9 up to 2375 MHz with the memory at 166 Mhz. Not a bad overclock using "only" 2.05V as I cool it with a really filthy Gigabyte 3D Rocket air cooler. The system is still more than 10% slower than the Tualatin at 1575 MHz, at least in 3D benchmarks.

testing an MX440 on my cubx, it artifacts on windows xp loading screen and fails once I load drivers or go over 8bits 640x480, apart from that it gives a clear picture 🤣

no sure if it's the card or compatibility, I guess it's the card,

Cleaned my old Olivetti M240 8086 PC

Now rebuilding, and I ordered soms new batterys for 3 mainboards.. Some are leaking 😒

I could not stand the Willamette P4 any longer so I changed the CPU to a P4 Northwood 2.26. Many people who bought a motherboard with Intel 845 chipset, PC133 memory and a Willamette P4 probably did this upgrade within a year after they built the system as the Northwood with its larger cache dosnt get as bottlenecked by the slow memory. The Northwood with 133/533 MHz FSB isnt officially supported by the P4B though but it works fine.

Already at stock 2.26 GHz with the memory running at stock 133 MHz CL 2-2-2-6 this CPU is much faster than the Willamette at 2375 MHz in 3D benchmarks.

Interesting findings. Is this because of the chipset? There are S478 motherboard with 865 chipset that take both core types. Would be cool to know how much of a difference you see here.

philscomputerlab wrote:

- No SSE2 which means many software won't work, including Steam, which is a huge blow for me as I have a lot of great Windows XP games on Steam

Last I was aware, officially the Steam game launcher is not supposed to require SSE2 but they keep forgetting this and breaking it. They've broken and refixed it at least twice, each time it takes them months to do so. I don't know if it's currently broken today or not. Once I got it working on my P3, I put it in offline mode and left it that way.

In the episode when I was dealing with it, the problem was crashhandler.dll. Somebody on the Steam forums posted how to replace that file with an older version and then type a config file that keeps it from updating. However, in the time since then, I remember one of their updates saying they had once again fixed the SSE2 issue, so the current version might just work as is.

That person's post is #355 from this thread:
http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1 … /?l=english#p24

<Steam>Dimon wrote:

Well.......... […]
Show full quote

Well..........

I think I found workaround

=== WORKS ====================================================
My current Steam folder has 2 DLL files of the crash error
- crashhandler.dll (= Version 2.37.82.33 = 297,664 bytes) <=== This is problem!
- crashhandler.dll.old (= Version 2.35.92.75 = 308,416 bytes August 13 2014)
- Steam.exe (=Version 02.37.82.33 August 28 2014)
- Steam.exe.old (=Version 02.35.92.75 August 13 2014)

1. delete crashhandler.dll (= Version 2.37.82.33)
2. rename crashhandler.dll.old to crashhandler.dll (= Version 2.35.92.75)
3. create steam.cfg with 1 line text "BootStrapperInhibitAll=Enable" without quotation in Steam folder
4. Now, test steam.exe starting.
===============================================================

I uploaded my files if you want to compare
Steam bootstrap crash workaround.zip ==> http://www40.zippyshare.com/v/17900901/file.html

Still I want Valve to fix the crashhandler.dll instruction as soon as possible.
If Valve fixes, then just delete steam.cfg file which is preventing update.

Note: You do NOT need to use old Steam.exe which is dated August 13 2014.
===============================================================

I didn't use his file, so I don't know if it's clean. I can share mine, but you have no reason to trust me either. 😀

I have no reason to believe it wouldn't be clean. People offering fixes like that are almost always genuine.
Whether it will break other stuff or not is still up for questioning. I don't really have a lot of reason to run steam on my P3 boxen though

Thanks, that gives me some hope. Still waiting for the CPU, but I'll be checking this out soon.

Have you ordered yourself a Rosewill RCX-Z100 yet? I can confirm that GOG.com installers work on 3DNOW! and SSE Athlon XP processors. So you can always revert back to that if all else fails. What GPU are you going to pair with the Athlon XP? It would be nice to see you going with something like a Radeon 9700/9800, but you don't like ATI cards so I doubt we'll see that.