tincup wrote:One of the delights of retro gaming and PC building is that it's not the tradeoff between price and performance that it always is on the leading edge. You're free to slide up and down the performance scale, platforms and hardware, at whim, dialing in whatever capabilities you care to, free of dollar concerns [except for the exceptional parts], and delve into any nook that beckons. Purism and ruthless analysis is not necessarily a virtue, and perhaps even a drawback when putting these rigs together. Years later we are able to draw on a tool kit far vaster than anything we originally had at our disposal and the toughest choices are usually compatibility issues and matching system specs with targeted games.
This P4 discussion is a case in point. In it's day it was clearly a part wanting from a design standpoint. I jumped on the AMD bandwagon when it was clear that horsepower was a good deal cheaper per pound, and the Athlon had a racer's build while the P4 came across as a graceless technical kludge, the "station wagon" or "mini-van" of the CPU world. But freed from the constraints and demands that rendered P4's pedestrian qualities a drawback, now it's fun to take the old crate out for a spin - hey - it drives pretty good after all and get's the job done! So in spite of what may be called design inelegance, it's legitimate motive power for retro setups conceived within it's performance and feature envelope - and that's pretty cool in itself... Certainly there's no shame in having one in the stable... besides, my 3.6 Prescott does double duty when the furnace is on the fritz;)
Exactly, beautiful writeup Tincup! 😁
I only gave Northwood a try after reading opinions about Northwood written on this very forum and at the same time was given the old system of my sister, which happened to be an Intel s478 board with a Northwood 3.2GHz. It remained in my stash for a while until my LAN rigs were completed and using spare parts I had laying around, gave it a spin and I liked it 😀
But the thing does need good cooling (requiring a case with good ventilation) a good graphics card to be able to use Northwood's power (which again needs to be cooled properly) and a good PSU. Switching the Northwood for a Prescott will not change anything performance wise except that I'd need to get even better cooling and a better PSU, which costs money...money for no gain at all. Also the rig will become a bit more noisy due to the better airflow required for Prescott. 😜
I think I'll give my s478 Prescott a spin only if my Northwood 3.0GHz is dead (I tried to build another Northwood but the CPU+board wouldn't post, so it's either the board or the CPU but I had no other parts to switch around with so I was never sure which part was at fault and it was a long time ago so can't remember what the issue exactly was) and the HP s478 board I got last Friday is working and I get a decent PSU for the thing.
I'm kinda waiting for a good deal for a good quality PSU (preferably 350W or more) and if I see such a deal, I'll buy another batch just like I did last time 🤣
sliderider wrote:
The problem with technological dead ends is that it wasn't just Intel that went down the dead end, they pulled millions of users down that road with them and the users ended up paying the price for Intel's shortsightedness. They made P4 a "success" when it didn't deserve to be. More people should have been buying Athlons during that time period instead which would have given AMD the money to make Athlon even better than it turned out to be. Maybe we could have avoided the Bulldozer disaster altogether if AMD had a bigger warchest with which to develop future designs.
True and when I first heard of the Netburst architecture, it kinda sounded like this to me:
Intel: Well, we made this great new CPU! And to make it clock higher more easily we'll just make the CPU dumber by lengthening the pipelines!
Sure it performs more crappy then a similarly clocked Pentium 3, but we'll just clock it higher!
Sure it will generate more heat but we don't care! We can still say to the public that we got the highest clocked processor compared to that other CPU selling dude because we know just how stupid people are! 😁
Then Intel made Northwood
Intel: Yeah, we past 3GHz with this motherfucker and that other chipfactory can't even get past 2.2GHz with their Athlon XP! We beat them yeah! But now we got to really crush them for good so we can finally rake in the cash like we did when we were selling our DX4's! 😁
Lets design a chip that's even more stupid then Northwood by again lengthening the pipelines, shrinking the die and clock it to 10GHz! *Champaign corks pops in Intel HQ*
Then they made Prescott
Intel: Ah crap! This thing sucks even more then the Northwood! Dammit, what do we do now!
Wait!
We know!
We'll just give it even more cache to compensate for this new processors stupidness!!!
Sure it will run even hotter then a jet engine but nobody will care! 😁
Crap, it still doesn't perform as well as Northwood!
Well, lets just give it SSE3 so we can sell these bitches faster! 😁
Uh oh, we can barely clock this thing higher then Northwood. Oh well, at least we sold tons of these things so what could possibly go wrong??? 😁
Then AMD made Athlon64
Intel: Holy sweet mother of all macaroni's!
We know what to do! We'll just give this shitty processor even more cache and call it the Extreme Edition! 😁
Why are they calling our P4EE the emergency edition?
Dammit they're finally on to us!
Well lets just fire half our staff and create a rework of the Pentium 3, give it a great name and star it on television with all the money we took from our customer's pockets!
haha, we win! 😁