Here I'll cover my selection process for choosing a CPU. I have ordered the Pentium 4, and am just awaiting its arrival from Germany. As stated before, I'll use a placeholder in the meantime.

I referenced this thread while deciding on a CPU for this project: Fastest/Best Pentium 4? There is some good information and benchmarks in there.

I made a little table with the top CPU of each P4 desktop series (excluding Willamette because.. yeah...), as well as all the Extreme Editions. Also note that this is the "Ultimate" Pentium 4 project, not Ultimate Netburst project, hence the absence of Pentium D (I checked and my partner is definitely just interested in named Pentium 4 chips).

So, right off the bat, I disqualified any of the P4 EE chips because they're hundreds of dollars on Ebay and that's just not within the budget of this project. I also counted out Northwood because they're all 478 and we're working with 775. So that leaves us with the 1MB Prescotts, and the 2MB Prescotts and Cedar Mills. As noted in the thread mentioned above, the 1MB Prescotts sometimes have an advantage due to lower cache latency, but I think the 2MB ones seem like a better choice overall. The top Cedar Mill 661 is 200MHz slower than the top Prescott 2MB, but the lower TDP is very attractive, and with Cedar Mill apparently being good overclockers, I fully expect getting it to 3.8 or even 4.0GHz will be trivial on the P45 board. So there it is, the Cedar Mill 661 has a big cache, seems fast in benchmarks, should overclock decently, and has a lower TDP than the other options. Most importantly, it wasn't very expensive to source one on Ebay.

So a Pentium 4 with 2MB cache and 800MHz memory bandwidth sounds really good, and should hopefully let the platform shine. Before my first custom build, back in 2007-2008, I was using a 3GHz Northwood which I had no complaints with. Even so, this will have an even higher clockspeed, 4x the cache, and twice the memory bandwidth, so I'm hoping it will blow that chip out of the water. I did also do some reading about Prescott and Cedar Mill having a longer pipeline than Northwood, but even so, if I can get it to 4GHz I expect it will be pretty good for a Pentium 4. I toyed with getting a DDR3 motherboard (yes, believe it or not there are a few 775 boards with DDR3 that support Netburst!), but the cost of having to buy a rare motherboard AND more memory vs. using parts I already have is not worthwhile at this time.

The Pentium 4 661 Cedar Mill might not be the best Pentium 4, but it certainly should be one of the best, and I think it will be a good choice for this project.

CapnCrunch53 wrote on 2022-06-04, 00:48:

My partner is a huge fan of Windows XP, and also really loves the Pentium 4.

Lol, there is no accounting for taste 😜

I'd normally say stick with the E8500 CPU, it is a whole lot faster than any P4 you could get. I see your getting one of the Cedar Mill varieties of P4 ... they seem to have gotten thermal performance under control, so good choice.

But using a P45 board with polymer caps is also a good choice, P4's used to like cooking their boards, it took a few years for motherboard makers to get that crap under control.

Make sure you partition your SSD using a 3rd party tool and ensure your Windows XP partition is aligned to 4kb boundries. Windows XP setup will create the partition at sector 63, which means all reads/writes will be misaligned, which is not really healthy for the SSD.

Make sure you keep the 8800GS as well cooled as you can, to maximize it's life. The hotter members of the 8800 series can suffer "bumpgate" style failure. I'd probably suggest a 7 series geforce for a more matching experience to a P4 ... 8 series geforce really was a core 2 duo companion, but no biggy.

canthearu wrote on 2022-06-04, 01:23:

Lol, there is no accounting for taste 😜

Haha as an Athlon 64 person myself, it does create a fun friendly rivalry!

I'd normally say stick with the E8500 CPU, it is a whole lot faster than any P4 you could get. I see your getting one of the Cedar Mill varieties of P4 ... they seem to have gotten thermal performance under control, so good choice.

Oh for sure, but I've got plenty of other machines for raw performance. Definitely hanging onto that E8500 for the future though!

Make sure you partition your SSD using a 3rd party tool and ensure your Windows XP partition is aligned to 4kb boundries. Windows XP setup will create the partition at sector 63, which means all reads/writes will be misaligned, which is not really healthy for the SSD.

Ah thank you, this is very helpful to know! Will do.

Make sure you keep the 8800GS as well cooled as you can, to maximize it's life. The hotter members of the 8800 series can suffer "bumpgate" style failure. I'd probably suggest a 7 series geforce for a more matching experience to a P4 ... 8 series geforce really was a core 2 duo companion, but no biggy.

I do have a 7800GTX on hand as well, I might try both out. I'm fine with the GPU being bottlenecked a bit though, as the goal is to let the processor shine as much as possible. It's also worth noting that both GPUs are the style where the PCB is exposed with a heatsink just slapped onto the die, which may not be ideal as it tends to trap warm air in the case. I do have a 9600GSO 384MB that is a dual-slot blower-style card which exhausts air out the back of the case, and I would not be opposed to using that instead if thermals are an issue.

I used to run 2 single-slot 8800GT cards in SLI in a Lian Li PC-65B that had very inadequate cooling back in my first build. That was such a nightmare to try and keep cool!

Memories are unlocking as I think back... if I remember correctly, those single slot G92 cards had a bug where the fans ran at a static 30% no matter what, and the cards would cook themselves without intervention. I remember I used RivaTuner to set a custom fan curve with them always at a baseline of 60% fan speed, ramping up to 100% as they got hotter. Even in my airflow-starved case, this was enough to keep them at safe temperatures, even if I had to deal with noise as a result. Those cards are still going strong today, by the way. Haven't used it much recently, but that machine got transplanted into a CM 690 II (thankfully with far better airflow) and served as my work PC until 2017, and now gets occasional use when I host retro lan parties for my friends around the holidays.

Well, another option, if you want to go overpowered video, is the GTX 260/275 cards. They are almost like cockroaches (everywhere) and most have a blower design. From what I remember, the 200 series was much like the 8 and 9 series, but faster.

P45 with a 661 is a really nice build, I would go for a GTX280 myself as they are cheap and plentiful and have a ton of spare power for later cpu upgrades.

I recently purchased a 661 from Germany for 5Euro since I have always wanted a nice P4 and the EE versions are priced stupidly.

Was after a 670 or 672 but both are rare and hard to find, the *72 models have the Vt functions.

I've never had a GTX200-series card... that's an interesting idea. They certainly are cheap on ebay these days. Maybe a nice GTX260 Core 216? We'll have to see. I'll work with what I have for now, and go from there based on thermals and performance.

I am curious now though whether the 8800 will already be bottlenecked by the P4, or if a 260 would still provide a performance increase?

CapnCrunch53 wrote on 2022-06-05, 00:19:

I've never had a GTX200-series card... that's an interesting idea. They certainly are cheap on ebay these days. Maybe a nice GTX260 Core 216? We'll have to see. I'll work with what I have for now, and go from there based on thermals and performance.

I am curious now though whether the 8800 will already be bottlenecked by the P4, or if a 260 would still provide a performance increase?

Very likely unless you throw lots of eye candy at it with a suitably gpu crushing resolution.

But if you stick to normal details and 1024x768 then it’ll be waiting on the P4

canthearu wrote on 2022-06-04, 01:23:

Make sure you partition your SSD using a 3rd party tool and ensure your Windows XP partition is aligned to 4kb boundries. Windows XP setup will create the partition at sector 63, which means all reads/writes will be misaligned, which is not really healthy for the SSD.

Can you explain more about why this is the case with Windows XP? I’ve never heard this about XP and SSD’s previously. Does the same apply to Windows 98 on an SSD?

mrzmaster wrote on 2022-06-05, 04:02:

Can you explain more about why this is the case with Windows XP? I’ve never heard this about XP and SSD’s previously. Does the same apply to Windows 98 on an SSD?

SSDs have internal write blocks of 4kb. And windows XP generally read/writes in blocks of at least 4kb.

If the partition on your SSD is aligned correctly, a 4kb write is simply done as a single write replacing the entire contents of a block. However, if the partition on the SSD is not aligned correctly, then the SSD controller has to read the 2 x 4kb blocks that a non-aligned partition is split over, then write both those 2 x 4kb blocks to complete any write operation.

You need to take the same precautions with windows 98 and earlier operating systems on SSDs as well. Microsoft did not update the the partition creation behavior of fdisk and their installers until after Windows XP. Although, with DOS based operating systems, you will probably see a lot more 512 byte writes, which are not really great for SSD either. This is balanced by the fact that DOS/Windows 9x based systems are much less write heavy than any of the NT based operating systems we use these days, so they don't hammer the SSD very hard in the first place.

For just testing a configuration, I wouldn't bother with partition alignment, but for medium to long term use, I would definitely fix it.

Thanks for this information. What third party partitioning tools do you recommend that can align partitions? It would be great if there were Windows 10/11 native ones for ease of use when I just connect the SSD to my modern machine.

Is your board capable of XMS?

kitten.may.cry wrote on 2022-06-05, 15:37:

Is your board capable of XMS?

The DOS nerd in me is screaming that this is eXtended Memory System (XMS) .. but the modern nerd knows that you cant be asking about that for a Pentium 4 class machine.

kitten.may.cry wrote on 2022-06-05, 15:37:

Is your board capable of XMS?

Sorry, but I'm not quite sure what XMS is in this context; could you elaborate? The ram is called Corsair XMS2, but that's just what they named that product line, I don't think it's referring to a particular feature or anything.

EDIT: Could you be referring to XMP perhaps? If so, this is kind of interesting: According to the manual for this motherboard, it does indeed support XMP (Extreme Memory Profile), even though it is a DDR2 board and Wikipedia claims that XMP was developed for DDR3. So that's kind of interesting, but I wonder if that really means anything or if that's just a fancy name for the standard way boards read SPD info from DDR2? This is really outside of my area of knowledge.

DDR2 had EPP, but that's on Nvidia chipsets. Both are not important if you know how to setup primary timing for memory.

I personally wouldn't use the 8800, it's a great card, iconic, loved by many, but it matches a core2quad better, it's so 2008, it looks too new for a Pentium 4. If I were you, I'd choose an Nvidia GF6800.

I would also use 2 or 4 hds in raid, but using ssd is understandable these days, since there are no more reliable small sized hard disks (period correct) on the market.

I recently built a P4 3.8Ghz 2MB, unfortunately I didn't find cedar mill, and I'm using a preshot. Damn it heats up my whole room when it's on 🤣

To take a high-end Core 2 Quad board, and run a single-core Pentium 4 on it...

Surely it is prime meme material. I just can't figure out the best one to choose.

To take a high-end Core 2 Quad board, and run a single-core Pentium 4 on it...

Well, you need 16-phase VRM to unleash true potential of Pentium D Extreme.

CapnCrunch53 wrote on 2022-06-06, 23:49:

kitten.may.cry wrote on 2022-06-05, 15:37:

Is your board capable of XMS?

Sorry, but I'm not quite sure what XMS is in this context; could you elaborate? The ram is called Corsair XMS2, but that's just what they named that product line, I don't think it's referring to a particular feature or anything.

EDIT: Could you be referring to XMP perhaps? If so, this is kind of interesting: According to the manual for this motherboard, it does indeed support XMP (Extreme Memory Profile), even though it is a DDR2 board and Wikipedia claims that XMP was developed for DDR3. So that's kind of interesting, but I wonder if that really means anything or if that's just a fancy name for the standard way boards read SPD info from DDR2? This is really outside of my area of knowledge.

My bad, I was just very used to call it XMS, thanks to Corsair.