I recall MOHAA working really well with willamettes - the higher end ones anyway. but since it's a Radeon you tried an idtech3 game with, r_primitives 2 should help a bit for that.

The SDRAM seems most atypical as early P4's usually had RDRAM, and DDR was also commonly used otherwise. Save that SDRAM for a good Slot 1/SS7...

Sly_Botts wrote on 2022-10-18, 22:37:

Hey guys, […]
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Hey guys,

My Neighbour is moving away, and he was emptying out his shed when he came across his old Pentium 4 Compaq Evo D300s. He asked me if I wanted it so I inherited this P4 system. Here are the Specs:

CPU: Pentium 4 1.5Ghz Willamette
FSB: 400mhz
RAM: 384 mb SD RAM PC133
Motherboard: Compaq motherboard with AGP x4 1.5v slot (AGP 2.0), onboard Network and Audio, USB 1.1 only (no 2.0)
GPU: Nvidia TNT2 M64
Storage: 60GB Western Digital HDD
PSU: 250w Proprietary Compaq PSU (which means mobo power pins are not ATX standard)
Media: 3 inch floppy, x1 IDE CD rom drive.
Front panel audio and USB

After some research I realized this system was designed as a workstation PC for schools and businesses. I never owned a Pentium 4 as during that time I was an AMD XP and later an AMD 64 user. So therefore, I don't have much experience with these CPU's and gaming. I figured I could build an early to mid 00's windows gaming machine with this. I recently had repaired a broken Radeon 9800 and was looking for something to use it in. The motherboard was in mint condition. All caps in good condition, no dust, no dirt, no bugs. It sat in a dry area. Its Northern Ontario Canada so weather can be quite cold for 6 months of the year.

I took out the case fan and CPU fan. The cpu has some kind of metal foil I assume was used similar to thermal paste. I applied new thermal paste to the CPU. I cleaned and lubricated the bearings on the fans (with 10w30 oil as it was all I had at the time) with great success. The system powered on, posted, etc.. no issues there. Fans nice and quiet. I did later discover that there was a bad memory chip in there but I had some to spare so no issue.

I wanted to test performance of this system to I did some tinkering. I added some RAM to give it a nice rounded 512mb of RAM as per the 2001 gaming standard. I put my radeon 9800 pro in there and installed windows 98Se.

I decided to test the system using the first game I played on my Athlon XP 1800+ back in 2002. Medal Of Honor, Allied Assault. I put all the settings on high and played at 1024x768. I remember playing this game, with these settings on my Athlon back in 2002 with a Geforce4 mx 440. So I assumed it would run quite well. It didn't though. Frame rates were horrible (below 30) when action got intense. It never did this to me on my Athlon. So I lowered Resolution to 800x600 and even 640x480. Performance was still pretty horrible. So I thought maybe the Radeon 9800 pro was too much for the 250w PSU. I took it out and put in the Geforce 4 mx440 4x/8x AGP card I have.

My first thought was maybe the CPU is bottlenecking the system. So I did some research and discovered this system supported P4 CPU' s up to 2.8Ghz Northwood (non HT). I found a 2.6Ghz on Ebay for 8 USD and ordered that. I also found a Radeon 9600 XT (Which does not require external power). I figured it would be best for this system. I also ordered 1.5GB of SD RAM x3 sticks of PC133 and have since recieved an Audigy2 ZS sound card (for EAX) as I have never experienced true EAX before.

Since then I have installed windows XP using an IDE to SD card adaptor. I noticed some improvement in this game but not much. The Geforce4 Mx 440 seems to be doing a fair decent job, but not as good as I remember it and some of the benchmarks I see.

I know its only 400mhz fsb, but am I correct in assuming the CPU is the bottleneck here? I'm not looking for any blazing fast computer but for 2002-2003 games, would the 2.6Ghz processor and Radeon 9600 XT make a big difference?

I am really surprised here since I recently installed a Pentium 3 coppermine 933/133 CPU on my ASUS P2B system with a slotket running at 700mhz with a 100fsb and a vood00 3 3000, getting almost the same performance in games like Elite Force 2 and Unreal Tournament.

What you guys think? CPU? The SD RAM instead of DDR? Am I just remembering wrong about the XP 1800+ performing way better?

(Note: I'm talking about the 1.5ghz CPU as I have yet to receive the 2.6Ghz one or the Radeon)

Look here, and remember that the below was with RDRAM whereas your board uses SDRAM .
https://www.anandtech.com/show/661

EDIT :

And an example of the hit SDRAM causes vs RDRAM in one game example (Unreal Tournament) :
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-ddr,403-7.html

Go back to windows 9x now that you have the faster processor.

Clock per clock pentium 4s aren’t faster than pentium 3s

But 2.8ghz p4 will be faster than any p3

Go back to the 9800.

Other than that, your ram is slow, drop the timings.

That’s about all you can do. Past that, new mobo

Pentium 4 SDRAM (non DDR) setups were not great. They were a low cost solution.

darry wrote on 2022-10-18, 23:14:

Pentium 4 SDRAM (non DDR) setups were not great. They were a low cost solution.

Thanks for the advice everyone.

Looks like I was possibly correct then, the CPU plus the SD ram is limiting performance. Well I'll see what I can get out of it with the 2.6 Ghz CPU and 9600 XT. I do have an Athlon 64 at my inlaws. Im waiting to get back but until then, this will be my XP machine. Hopefully the faster CPU will work out better. (I'm only looking for stable 60fps on most games from the era) This is what it will look like when I'm done.

CPU: Pentium 4 2.6Ghz Northwood
RAM: 1.5GB SDRAM PC133
Audio: Audigy 2 ZS
GPU: Radeon 9600 XT
Storage: 16GB IDE to SD card for win XP, 60GB HDD for extra storage and Win 98se.

I'm saving the 9800 pro for my Athlon 64 build when I get that as I will be able to install a 450 watt new PSU in there.

Sly_Botts wrote on 2022-10-18, 23:28:

Thanks for the advice everyone. […]
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darry wrote on 2022-10-18, 23:14:

Pentium 4 SDRAM (non DDR) setups were not great. They were a low cost solution.

Thanks for the advice everyone.

Looks like I was possibly correct then, the CPU plus the SD ram is limiting performance. Well I'll see what I can get out of it with the 2.6 Ghz CPU and 9600 XT. I do have an Athlon 64 at my inlaws. Im waiting to get back but until then, this will be my XP machine. Hopefully the faster CPU will work out better. (I'm only looking for stable 60fps on most games from the era) This is what it will look like when I'm done.

CPU: Pentium 4 2.6Ghz Northwood
RAM: 1.5GB SDRAM PC133
Audio: Audigy 2 ZS
GPU: Radeon 9600 XT
Storage: 16GB IDE to SD card for win XP, 60GB HDD for extra storage and Win 98se.

I'm saving the 9800 pro for my Athlon 64 build when I get that as I will be able to install a 450 watt new PSU in there.

PS: SDRAM PC133 is what holding you back on P4 2.6. If you had a motherboard that used DDR memory, this will help so much. I had P4 2.8C with DDR in a Dell Dimension 8300 and was very nice.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-10-18, 23:41:

Sly_Botts wrote on 2022-10-18, 23:28:

Thanks for the advice everyone. […]
Show full quote

darry wrote on 2022-10-18, 23:14:

Pentium 4 SDRAM (non DDR) setups were not great. They were a low cost solution.

Thanks for the advice everyone.

Looks like I was possibly correct then, the CPU plus the SD ram is limiting performance. Well I'll see what I can get out of it with the 2.6 Ghz CPU and 9600 XT. I do have an Athlon 64 at my inlaws. Im waiting to get back but until then, this will be my XP machine. Hopefully the faster CPU will work out better. (I'm only looking for stable 60fps on most games from the era) This is what it will look like when I'm done.

CPU: Pentium 4 2.6Ghz Northwood
RAM: 1.5GB SDRAM PC133
Audio: Audigy 2 ZS
GPU: Radeon 9600 XT
Storage: 16GB IDE to SD card for win XP, 60GB HDD for extra storage and Win 98se.

I'm saving the 9800 pro for my Athlon 64 build when I get that as I will be able to install a 450 watt new PSU in there.

PS: SDRAM PC133 is what holding you back on P4 2.6. If you had a motherboard that used DDR memory, this will help so much. I had P4 2.8C with DDR in a Dell Dimension 8300 and was very nice.

Cheers,

I had a P4 2.8 (Northwood, 800MHz effective FSB, HT ) on an Asus P4P800 with dual channel DDR SDRAM and that thing was, IMHO, quite fast for the time with a Radeon 9700 . I had upgraded from a 1.4GHz Tbird with SDRAM on a KT133A based board with a Radeon 8500.

darry wrote on 2022-10-19, 00:39:

I had a P4 2.8 (Northwood, 800MHz effective FSB, HT ) on an Asus P4P800 with dual channel DDR SDRAM and that thing was, IMHO, quite fast for the time with a Radeon 9700 . I had upgraded from a 1.4GHz Tbird with SDRAM on a KT133A based board with a Radeon 8500.

Yeah the 2.6ghz cpu and 9600xt helped but wasn't the gain I wanted. So I started fresh:

Cpu: Pentium 4 3.0ghz HT Prescott
Mobo: ASUS P4p800-x
RAM: 2gb pc3200 dual channel
GPU: Radeon x800 pro 256mb, Catalyst 5.13
HDD: 120gb Kingston Solid State
OS: Windows XP SP 3 with unofficial SP 4
PSU: 450w EVGA

Runs any game up to 2005 very well at high settings 1024x768. Had to turn off HT though. Fps is more stable now The Athlon XP 2800+ I have seems to perform almost as good as this. I was quite surprised.