the p4 is going to be faster,
I mean, the core might not be much faster (but it's northwood, so it should be) but the memory/fsb is way faster as far as I know (quad rate fsb, DDR support)...

if you want to use an AGP 3.3V (like the V5 5500) card I think it will be easier to find the appropriate motherboard for the P3.

I say the pentium 3. Pentium 4 is dismal clock for clock

I got odd lagginess in dos games under 98 on a p4, never that problem with a p3.

I'd call it a tie. Hate to bring up 3DMark01 yet again, but it's the only benchmark I've run on a wide variety of machines and it's a great basic CPU gaming performance indicator (I believe only the original SSE is used--same as most games from 1999-2001).

With a 9800Pro, Catalyst 7.3 and WinXP SP3:

-P4 1.8 Willamette: 9147
-PIII-S @ 1400MHz: 9942
-PIII-S @ 1585MHz: 11544
-P4 2.4/400 Northwood: 12083
-AXP 2400+ (2.0GHz): 12168
-A64 3700+ (2.2GHz): 18485

(chipsets used: i845-DDR, Via 694X, nForce2, and nForce3)

I never had the chance to test a 1.8A, but based on the 1.8W and 2.4A results, I'd estimate a 1.8A to perform just about the same as a stock-clocked PIII-1400. If you have any Win98 applications that make good use of SSE2, the 1.8A will pull ahead (3DMark01 recognizes SSE2, but I'm not entirely convinced that it takes advantage of it). Also, the low-clocked Northwoods are excellent overclockers.

If you're going to be running at stock clocks and won't be using SSE2 (most games from 98-01 don't), the PIII-S should be just as fast and consume about half the power.

soviet conscript wrote:

I'm putting together another build for the fun of it.

So... Your question is which one is more "fun" ?

The P3 1400S will outperform the P4 1.8 by a wide margin on many benchmarks, especially FPU-heavy tasks like gaming. Have a look at my benchmark spreadsheet here.

There are a handful of 3.3v compatible P4 boards but they are SIS based and of a early generation which sucks. Go for a fast P3 or Athlon/XP system and not look back. If you had a 1.5v v4 4500 you can use it just about anything that has a agp slot but those are rare.

Northwood 1.8 should be as fast or better for games,

Tualatin 1.4 183
Northwood 1.8 229

not much difference in this game:

and if you consider OC, 1.5GHz is already high for Tualatin, northwood 1.8 can probably run at 2.4-2.6 with no major problems,

but I think Tualatin is pretty fast for Windows 98 gaming, and as I said, I think it's probably easier to find AGP 3.3 boards and so on... also it's probably more fun (subjective).

Jorpho wrote:

soviet conscript wrote:

I'm putting together another build for the fun of it.

So... Your question is which one is more "fun" ?

no.....I'm building another one for fun but I still want one that I do build for fun to be one that performs better. Jorpho, I'm glad I can count on you to always be delightfully facetious.

hmmm, I'm assuming p4 boards are pretty cheap right now. do Tulatin capable board still sell for a premium? I don't see a lot of them on Ebay.

They don't seem that uncommon
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-D815EEA2-D815EP … =item4d1ae3cb3d

I love how the P4 is starting to get some love here 😀

I've been working a lot with P4 gear the last few weeks and there are lots of benefits:

- P4 gear is very cheap
- Intel chipset boards very stable and mature
- SATA! Hook up a 500GB Sata, create a 30GB partition and you are set
- Very cheap CPUs compared to PIII
- With a slow CPU you will run the P4 system at the low end in terms of power draw and heat compared to PIII at the absolute maximum
- Scalability from 1.4 GHz to 3.4 GHz
- At least here in Australia (good) Tualatin boards are quite rare and expensive. Usually VIA chipset only. 815 are quite hard to get. And remember you will run a PIII 1.4 at it's limits with PIII boards. Whereas with P4 it's the other way round. I got 3 P4 boards for a dollar from eBay. They are still cheap and now is the time to get in hard and start building a collection. The P4 systems will be the next systems to start going up in price.

Stick with the good brands like Asus, Gigabyte, AOpen, Asrock, MSI, Abit. Avoid OEM boards from HP, Acer, Dell.

I will use a P4 system for a massive Voodoo 2 (SLI) scaling benchmark marathon to represent the platform beyond Tualatin 1.4.

But what about a single Voodoo2 in a P4? Will that risk a fry without additional cooling?

leileilol wrote:

But what about a single Voodoo2 in a P4? Will that risk a fry without additional cooling?

Haven't noticed anything like that on a P4 2.4 GHz. But I will keep an eye on it with a thermal sensor. Still waiting for some Voodoo 2 cards to arrive because one of mine has memory issues.

leileilol wrote:

But what about a single Voodoo2 in a P4? Will that risk a fry without additional cooling?

Fry what? 😕

As to the original question: I think it depends on what you want the rest of the system to have, hardware wise. If you want 3.3V AGP cards (usually this means 3dfx Voodoo AGP cards) the P3 is a better choice because its easier to find a compatible motherboard; if you don't care about that and are going to use a card that will support 1.5V AGP then I'd go with the P4 for forwards-compatibility, especially if you're going with a Northwood. I don't think Intel nixed Win9x support until Core 2 came about, so you shouldn't have problems with drivers as long as you stick to S478 hardware.

Mau1wurf1977: Good points, but one of them isn't entirely accurate, specifically: "With a slow CPU you will run the P4 system at the low end in terms of power draw and heat compared to PIII at the absolute maximum" - the slowest P4s are generally Willamette models, which have TDPs on the relatively higher side of the scale (70-80W) for P4s (higher vCore + 180nm process is to blame). While some later P3s are "hot" relatively (we're talking like 30-40W TDP at worst; the 1.4GHz is 31W TDP for example) speaking, there are many Socket A/370 universal coolers that will easily handle those chips (like the Thermalright SI-97, which runs a 1GHz Coppermine at more or less room ambient).

Oh didn't realise the Willamate are so bad 😊

Northwood then! The 1.6A has 40W, but most P4 S478 boards are built and designed for up to 100W, right? That's what I meant.

Whereas with the PIII 1.4s I always worry that the board is going to go 😵 any moment.

Regarding W98SE drivers, I can vouch for them. The main drivers you need is INF Intel chipset driver and Intel USB driver. They aren't hard to find on the manufacturer websites but you can also et them directly from Intel. After this just load that W98SE USB storage driver and you can use flash drives.

Lan, Audio, Firewire, PCI SATA controllers you just got to find the drivers from whatever manufacturer supplied the chips. Personally I disable all of them and have no issues 😀

Having owned a Tualatin @ 1.6ghz, as well as various P4 systems, i.e. a 1.8ghz Willie, 2.8ghz Northwood and 3.0ghz Prescott, I would say P4. For largely the same reasons that you have mentioned.

Another thing is that Tualatin came out in 2001 (the 1.4S was introduced sometime in 2002), so s478 systems are perfectly within that time frame. "Period correct" so to speak.

I always have issues mounting coolers on Tualatin chips because they are a little bit taller. For benchmarking I just put the cooler on top and don't fasten it. Works well enough 🤣

Got this board underway: http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/motherboard … d/AOpen/MX3S-T/

Because I need to include Tualatin in my Voodoo 2 project. It wouldn't be complete without it 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I always have issues mounting coolers on Tualatin chips because they are a little bit taller. For benchmarking I just put the cooler on top and don't fasten it. Works well enough 🤣

Got this board underway: http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/motherboard … d/AOpen/MX3S-T/

Because I need to include Tualatin in my Voodoo 2 project. It wouldn't be complete without it 😀

That's a very nice looking board for S370! At first glance it almost looks like a modern mATX FM2 board!
http://products.ncix.com/detail/asrock-fm2a85 … tx-39-82309.htm

indeed, and the IGP is probably comparable to the voodoo 2.