songoffall wrote on 2025-01-10, 10:17:

Unlike my old system, I'm not planning to run Windows XP on it, so 512Mb DDR is plenty.

nice system, so will you be tempted for windows Me or 2000? 😀

gerry wrote on 2025-01-10, 12:02:

songoffall wrote on 2025-01-10, 10:17:

Unlike my old system, I'm not planning to run Windows XP on it, so 512Mb DDR is plenty.

nice system, so will you be tempted for windows Me or 2000? 😀

I have another build for Windows ME almost ready - a cap on the motherboard looks iffy, so I might replace it, I just don't have a 3500uf cap of that size on hand.

I might dual-boot it to XP (no service packs) later. Atm I'm just getting it to work, and managed to run into a bunch of problems, but nothing as baffling as the Athlon XP/nForce build.

I decided to use a Seagate Barracuda 40Gb 7200RPM from another build and set the system up right now.

"APIC ACPI SCI IRQ" option in BIOS was enabled. It caused Windows to BSOD whenever the OS tried to talk to it.

I was unable to find the driver CD for this motherboard and the MSI website wasn't too helpful, but The Retro Web helped me out with at least chipset drivers. When Intel Application Accelerator finally agreed to install, the performance got quite good. I don't think the gaming performance is too affected, but at least system startup and shutdown times are impressive - 4 seconds from post to desktop, 2 seconds on shutdown.

I will drag race it with the Athlon XP 2000+, although I would assume the performance itself to be on the same level.

So interestingly the BIOS limits me to DDR-266, even though I have two identical 256Mb DDR-3200 SAMSUNG DIMMs installed, which should be DDR-400. Also, CPU-Z doesn't show most RAM data and claims it's operating in single-channel mode.

songoffall wrote on 2025-01-10, 10:17:

When I started up the build to test if it was functional, I was shocked to see that the CPU temp was about 60C, but perhaps the BIOS had a bug, because the heatsink wasn't that hot, and after a BIOS update the temp got to a more reasonable 40C, and after replacing the stock Intel cooler with a beefy Coolermaster it went further down to 30C at idle in BIOS. I have better results with my Athlon XP2000+, but that one has a completely custom cooling solution and a bunch of Noctua fans keeping it cool, and runs at a lower clock, so I'm quite satisfied with the cooling of the Northwood.

Pentium 4 CPUs heatspreaders have a paste TIM from the factory, and chips this old need to be delidded and have something fresh applied. You will go down 10 degrees by doing this.

mockingbird wrote on 2025-01-10, 19:23:

songoffall wrote on 2025-01-10, 10:17:

When I started up the build to test if it was functional, I was shocked to see that the CPU temp was about 60C, but perhaps the BIOS had a bug, because the heatsink wasn't that hot, and after a BIOS update the temp got to a more reasonable 40C, and after replacing the stock Intel cooler with a beefy Coolermaster it went further down to 30C at idle in BIOS. I have better results with my Athlon XP2000+, but that one has a completely custom cooling solution and a bunch of Noctua fans keeping it cool, and runs at a lower clock, so I'm quite satisfied with the cooling of the Northwood.

Pentium 4 CPUs heatspreaders have a paste TIM from the factory, and chips this old need to be delidded and have something fresh applied. You will go down 10 degrees by doing this.

I thought that might be the case, but I've never delidded a cpu in my life. Guess it's never too late to learn. Might even go for indium solder for a permanent solution.

songoffall wrote on 2025-01-10, 19:00:

So interestingly the BIOS limits me to DDR-266, even though I have two identical 256Mb DDR-3200 SAMSUNG DIMMs installed, which should be DDR-400. Also, CPU-Z doesn't show most RAM data and claims it's operating in single-channel mode.

Issue solved, even though the solution was a bit... disappointing. Apparently you need an 800FSB CPU to run the RAM at 400, and my 2GHz P4 was 400FSB, which limited it to 266. Swapped the CPU to P4 HT 3GHz (SL6WK), which is still Northwood. Problem is, I didn't really want a 3GHz CPU in my Win98SE machine. Some of the fun comes from pushing the machine to its limits, but well, guess I can live with this.

If you're using an HT CPU with Win98, you might want to disable the HT in the BIOS.

songoffall wrote on 2025-01-10, 19:55:

I thought that might be the case, but I've never delidded a cpu in my life. Guess it's never too late to learn. Might even go for indium solder for a permanent solution.

I can't count the number of times I've pulled a heatsink off a P4 and it "self-delidded"... That said -- take care, I have also destroyed many a chip by delidding.

Every time I see this thread title pop up in active I read it as "norwood" and think it's about balding

mockingbird wrote on 2025-01-12, 00:33:

songoffall wrote on 2025-01-10, 19:55:

I thought that might be the case, but I've never delidded a cpu in my life. Guess it's never too late to learn. Might even go for indium solder for a permanent solution.

I can't count the number of times I've pulled a heatsink off a P4 and it "self-delidded"... That said -- take care, I have also destroyed many a chip by delidding.

Guess it's my time to destroy many a chip by delidding 😁 kidding, I'll be very careful.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2025-01-12, 00:57:

Every time I see this thread title pop up in active I read it as "norwood" and think it's about balding

I think that ship has long sailed for most of us, friend 😁

Nice build. I like the all-red PCBs combo you have going on. It's almost deceitful advertising, though, as red is more an ATI/AMD color (or at least it is now.) 😉

The only thing I can suggest is to definitely add a 90 or 120 mm fan on the back of the case to help move some of the heat away from that P4. And while at it, consider widening / re-drilling the holes on the back of the case, or just cutting away that restrictive grill entirely and replacing it with a wire one. I'm cheap, so I usually just re-drill the holes. 😁 It increases the fan airflow and reduces wooshing noise from it considerably (especially on really cheap cases with really tiny holes for the fan opening.)

As for the FX5500... might actually want to keep it. With nGlide, it may perform quite nice with some older games. 😀

songoffall wrote on 2025-01-10, 10:17:

... and the HDD - a WD Caviar 80Gb 7200rpm - is on its way.

Is it a model starting with "WD800" by any chance? If yes, remove the PCB on the HDD and inspect the contacts for the headstack/head actuator. On anything from WD with a SATA connector, these are known to tarnish and become unreliable over time. With IDE, it depends in if the PCB is lead-free or not. The late IDE ones have the same problem though. It's not always a cause of these drives going bad. However, I did revive a few of these drives from this, so it's certainly worth trying. Get a good pencil eraser and some IPA. After removing the PCB from the drive, clean the head contacts with the pencil eraser until they look shiny again. After that, clean area with IPA to remove any rubber residue from the pencil eraser, if any. Put back and run a full surface test with HD Tune or similar. If you still get bad sectors or the HDD is unreliable, then it's probably the disk surface inside the HDD that's going bad, and there's nothing else you can do.

songoffall wrote on 2025-01-10, 10:17:

When I started up the build to test if it was functional, I was shocked to see that the CPU temp was about 60C, but perhaps the BIOS had a bug, because the heatsink wasn't that hot, and after a BIOS update the temp got to a more reasonable 40C, and after replacing the stock Intel cooler with a beefy Coolermaster it went further down to 30C at idle in BIOS. I have better results with my Athlon XP2000+, but that one has a completely custom cooling solution and a bunch of Noctua fans keeping it cool, and runs at a lower clock, so I'm quite satisfied with the cooling of the Northwood.

Give it a good torture test with some benchmarks for 30+ minutes, then report back the highest CPU temperature you saw under load. Idle temperatures are mostly irrelevant.

songoffall wrote on 2025-01-10, 19:59:

Issue solved, even though the solution was a bit... disappointing. Apparently you need an 800FSB CPU to run the RAM at 400, and my 2GHz P4 was 400FSB, which limited it to 266. Swapped the CPU to P4 HT 3GHz (SL6WK), which is still Northwood. Problem is, I didn't really want a 3GHz CPU in my Win98SE machine. Some of the fun comes from pushing the machine to its limits, but well, guess I can live with this.

Considering most early socket 478 machines don't support Prescott and/or 800 MHz FSB (only 400 MHZ FSB and a few 533), that's a nice little upgrade for it.

mockingbird wrote on 2025-01-12, 00:33:

I can't count the number of times I've pulled a heatsink off a P4 and it "self-delidded"...

Must have been all Northwoods.
Prescotts, as far as I know, all have their IHS soldered to the die. And with that, I have not ever had a Prescott CPU go overheating on me... well, not anymore than it would even when it was new. They just need a chunky heatsink and a powerful fan to stay cool, that's all.
Also, compared to modern CPUs, they are not that hot at all. A high-end P4 Prescott will pull about 100-110 Watts absolute max, which is something many modern "45/65W TDP" CPUs will well-surpass if given ample cooling.

Well, 800 FSB actually went ask the way down to a 2.4 GHz Northwood. All 800 MHz have hyperthreading, which you won't gain anything in Win9x based OS.
But if you have an idea of the CPU shouldn't be that fast, why wouldn't you just be fine with ddr266 as well? 😀

H3nrik V! wrote on 2025-01-12, 19:11:

Well, 800 FSB actually went ask the way down to a 2.4 GHz Northwood. All 800 MHz have hyperthreading, which you won't gain anything in Win9x based OS.
But if you have an idea of the CPU shouldn't be that fast, why wouldn't you just be fine with ddr266 as well? 😀

Because I couldn't get a 1:1 FSB to memory ratio with 266 memory. When your 2GHz system is less responsive than your Pentium II 300MHz, that's less than ideal I think. It's all about bottlenecks; for most Windows98 scenarios after a certain point the CPU is no longer a bottleneck, but other problems arise.

I could live with 266MHz memory; but the 4:5 ratio was quite unpleasant - same issue on my Athlon XP PC. One of the reasons why I prefer to deal with SDRAM-based systems and not DDR-based systems. DDR memory controller is just plain awkward. With DDR2 it gets much better.

Oh, I get what you mean. Anything but 1:1 ratio kinda sucks on older architecture. But the just 200 MHz DDR, for that sake? But does the 2GHz really feel slower than a 300? That sounds crazy?

H3nrik V! wrote on 2025-01-12, 22:42:

Oh, I get what you mean. Anything but 1:1 ratio kinda sucks on older architecture. But the just 200 MHz DDR, for that sake? But does the 2GHz really feel slower than a 300? That sounds crazy?

The problem is the BIOS doesn't allow me to under clock faster DDR, and even slower DDR seems to be overclocked to 266, idk what the problem is. In terms of speed in Windows 98 SE I don't think 3GHz and 2GHz make much of a difference, which is why I prefer not to use the faster CPUs - those can always be used for Windows XP stuff. But FSB2RAM ratio is something I can really feel. Not just on desktop, but say in Morrowind the framerate is all over the place, and it's fine on much weaker SDRAM-based systems.

Yup, I tested it again. On the MSI 865P Neo with Pentium 4 2.0GHz SL6GQ any DDR defaults to 266MT/s, 133MHz at FSB 100MHz, bus speed 400. On Asus A7N8X-VM/400 with Athlon XP 2000+ any DDR defaults to 333MT/s, 166MHz, at bus speed 266. The only options to change it are to overclock the bus, but the bus and the DDR controller are tied to each other.

On MSI 865P Neo with Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz SL6WK I get a buss speed 800 and DDR speed 400, FSB to memory ratio 1:1.

songoffall wrote on 2025-01-13, 10:19:

Yup, I tested it again. On the MSI 865P Neo with Pentium 4 2.0GHz SL6GQ any DDR defaults to 266MT/s, 133MHz at FSB 100MHz, bus speed 400. On Asus A7N8X-VM/400 with Athlon XP 2000+ any DDR defaults to 333MT/s, 166MHz, at bus speed 266. The only options to change it are to overclock the bus, but the bus and the DDR controller are tied to each other.

On MSI 865P Neo with Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz SL6WK I get a buss speed 800 and DDR speed 400, FSB to memory ratio 1:1.

That's annoying! But, from the manual, I found this: "DRAM Frequency
Use this field to configure the clock frequency of the installed DRAM.
Settings are: SPD, 266MHz, 333MHz, Auto."

But it's in "Advanced chipset features\DRAM timing setting", so not very logical.

It looks like, maybe a 133FSB CPU and DDR266 may be an option albeit it looks like you're right that 100/200 is not possible ..

I agree that 1:1 FSB to DRAM clocks is better, but I can't say I noticed too much (if any difference) on any of my DDR systems when they weren't running 1:1, and I have many of these. One of the systems I tested more extensively (with gaming) back in the day was a 2 GHz P4 Northwood system with RAM running at 133 MHz (266 DDR). I could put the RAM as high as DDR333, but didn't because it was a finicky Corsair 1GB PC3200 Value RAM module that couldn't run its full speed on most systems, and I think sometimes even DDR333 was finicky. It had no problems running at DDR200 or DDR266 speeds, though. Still, I didn't notice any "back and forth" with the FPS in any games, and I used that system for a bit of gaming in the late 2000's (mostly Half-Life 2 Deathmatch... which ran rather poorly simply because it was a very CPU speed -based game... though probably didn't help that I only had a GeForce FX5600 in the PC either.) Just for reference, the motherboard for this system was an ECS P4VXASD2+ (Via chipset-based).

I also ran non-1:1 FSB:DRAM clocks in my main PC for a long time: a Dell Optiplex 170L with a 2.8 GHz P4 Prescott HT and i865 chipset motherboard (stock Dell one.) Due to one stick being DDR333 (PC2700), my RAM was running slower than my FSB. IIRC, I upgraded that system to 2 GB of matched DDR400/PC3200 RAM around 2019 or 2020, which then boosted the DRAM to DDR400. But I can't say I noticed any performance gains, both on the desktop and in the very few games I played on it (mostly Collin McRae Rally 4 and Need For Speed 5/6.)

songoffall wrote on 2025-01-12, 20:23:

I could live with 266MHz memory; but the 4:5 ratio was quite unpleasant - same issue on my Athlon XP PC. One of the reasons why I prefer to deal with SDRAM-based systems and not DDR-based systems. DDR memory controller is just plain awkward. With DDR2 it gets much better.

I think it just depends a lot on the platform and chipset used... maybe even a little bit (or more?) on the BIOS & board manufacturer.

For example, not all SDRAM-based systems are pain-free. If you ever had the "pleasure" of working with a motherboard with Intel i810 chipset, you'll understand. With that chipset, SDRAM is often not only limited to 512 MB, but also PC100 speeds. Meanwhile, PCs built around this exact chipset were usually late P3 era systems - i.e. 133 MHz FSB Coppermines. The cherry on top for these: no AGP port and only PCI. Yeah, they were... sloooooooow. 😁

As for DDR-based systems - not all of them are bad either. I actually really like my socket 754 and 939 AMDs - the memory controller is on the CPU, so no more of that FSB to DRAM ratio crap. With a competent BIOS, it's really easy to OC these and yet not go over-spec on the DRAM (useful if you are using plain DDR RAM but want to OC the system a little more heavily.) I think the first system I OC'ed well was my AsRock 939Dual-SATAII with its Athlon 64 3200+. Went right 250 MHz FSB (from 200 MHz stock), boosting the CPU clock from 2 GHz to 2.5 GHz - a nice 25% increase. No voltage mods, nothing. Just had to lower the memory frequency in BIOS from PC3200 to PC2100... which with the overclocked FSB brought it right back up to DDR400 speeds.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2025-01-13, 10:26:

That's annoying! But, from the manual, I found this: "DRAM Frequency Use this field to configure the clock frequency of the inst […]
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songoffall wrote on 2025-01-13, 10:19:

Yup, I tested it again. On the MSI 865P Neo with Pentium 4 2.0GHz SL6GQ any DDR defaults to 266MT/s, 133MHz at FSB 100MHz, bus speed 400. On Asus A7N8X-VM/400 with Athlon XP 2000+ any DDR defaults to 333MT/s, 166MHz, at bus speed 266. The only options to change it are to overclock the bus, but the bus and the DDR controller are tied to each other.

On MSI 865P Neo with Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz SL6WK I get a buss speed 800 and DDR speed 400, FSB to memory ratio 1:1.

That's annoying! But, from the manual, I found this: "DRAM Frequency
Use this field to configure the clock frequency of the installed DRAM.
Settings are: SPD, 266MHz, 333MHz, Auto."

But it's in "Advanced chipset features\DRAM timing setting", so not very logical.

It looks like, maybe a 133FSB CPU and DDR266 may be an option albeit it looks like you're right that 100/200 is not possible ..

That was the first thing I tried, it shows only two options: Auto and 266.

But I think you're right; if I tried a 533MT/s Pentium 4 (which is 4x133MHz), perhaps it would be 1:1 with DDR-266 (2x133MHz). But sadly, at this point in time I don't have a P4-533, so my current setup will have to do.