Sutekh94 wrote:
Well, in any case, I'm glad I stuck with AMD during the time period when P4 stuff was everywhere, right up until I got my Q6600-based rig around late 2010. No reason to use a P4 of any kind when you have a Barton Athlon XP 3200+ trailblazing the way ahead.
EDIT: see below posts
AthlonXP quickly became problematic for gaming due to the lack of SSE2/3. I remember back in ~2006 comparing my overclocked XP-M against a Celeron D (which is a Prescott), and while the XP-M had a clear advantage in "older" games like UT2004, the Celeron D even at the same clockspeed showed improvements for "newer" games like Oblivion, Hitman 4, NWN2, AOE3, etc. Sandra and other benchmarks also showed the improvements as well. With the Celeron D overclocked to being more equivalent to the XP's measured SSE/x87 performance, it was a better platform overall. Of course, by 2005-2006 the Athlon64 was also available, and offered even more performance potential.
And also remember: Quake 3 and NetBurst go together like peas and carrots. 😊
Sutekh94 wrote:
You are correct. After a little bit of digging on CPU World, I can confirm that the 478 Prescotts do not support SpeedStep. Matter of fact, I'm not even sure if any 478-based P4 supports SpeedStep.
Perhaps using the specific phrase "SpeedStep" was in error - P4 does feature thermal throttling and shutdown, even on Socket 478 (and I'm lazy and call all of Intel's throttling features "SpeedStep" 🤣 ). Specifically named SpeedStep is available on the Pentium 4-M, which is available for Socket 478.
Here's an article that shows the throttling process on both Northwood and Prescott:
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/p4-throttling/
Notice the erratic results with Prescott - couple that functionality with a cramped SFF enclosure and dinky hard-drive and the bad user experience is pretty easy to predict. I've worked on, and junked, enough of these kind of machines to fully understand the out and out hatred of Pentium 4 that most people seem to experience. Those boxes should not, however, be regarded as equivalent to a high end gaming box or workstation that uses NetBurst chips. Usually those machines have much better cooling, airflow, etc and offer reasonably good performance for their age, just like an AthlonXP or Athlon64.
candle_86 wrote:
I dunno, the 800mhz P4's do smoke the XP series, the Barton was never performance competitive, and if i remember right if you where going to spend 500+ on a cpu it was a P4, if you wanted to get bang for the buck you bought a Thoroughbred B XP 1700 and overclocked it.
A variety of K7 chips have been the "bang for the buck sweet spot" over the years - the XP 1700 is one of them. There are also Duron models, other AthlonXP models, AthlonXP-M models, Sempron models, etc. AthlonXP can be fairly competitive as long as SSE2/3 aren't a factor for whatever you're doing (e.g. "old games"). Note that I'm not really interested in the blood-feud-style comparisons where getting 102 FPS vs 104 FPS is as significant an event as the moon landing or invention of written language. So when I say "fairly competitive" I mean that if we're talking about an older game, like say UT2003, the AthlonXP is just as good as the Pentium 4 for the most part. 😊