Please explain why, exactly, you want to stick with netburst for that setup? You're not being held back by the OS('s hardware support) and would be much better served with sth modern. Factoring in electricity costs and it being your main driver - probably cheaper, too, in the long run.

Anyways, from what little description you gave for your use cases, I don't see a GPU helping you with anything outside of a bit of hardware accelerated video decompression. Go for as much CPU performance as you can get.

elszgensa wrote on 2024-02-28, 17:21:

Please explain why, exactly, you want to stick with netburst for that setup? You're not being held back by the OS('s hardware support) and would be much better served with sth modern. Factoring in electricity costs and it being your main driver - probably cheaper, too, in the long run.

Anyways, from what little description you gave for your use cases, I don't see a GPU helping you with anything outside of a bit of hardware accelerated video decompression. Go for as much CPU performance as you can get.

I think its a lot due to retro amusement. Getting something newer from intel or the best CPU for socket 775 would be awesome but it would not feel like the same thing. I think not even the financial aspect would hurt to get a core 2 as these CPUs are usually dirt cheap.

Eduardolucas1 wrote on 2024-02-28, 17:02:

I really like netburst due to this single-core performance and especially for retro reasons. i currently daily use the machine for everything, but i wonder if getting something like the 64-bit 3.6 or 3.8 ghz pentium 4`s compatible with socket 775 would be fun, especially for overclocking. I just feel the cooling may not be up to par. I run stock cooling and the machine is let open daily to help cooling, but its still very loud. I also don`t know if the PSU (not stock, a 250-300w PSU) would be up to par.

How are you going to overclock on a Dell OEM motherboard?!

VivienM wrote on 2024-02-29, 00:20:

Eduardolucas1 wrote on 2024-02-28, 17:02:

I really like netburst due to this single-core performance and especially for retro reasons. i currently daily use the machine for everything, but i wonder if getting something like the 64-bit 3.6 or 3.8 ghz pentium 4`s compatible with socket 775 would be fun, especially for overclocking. I just feel the cooling may not be up to par. I run stock cooling and the machine is let open daily to help cooling, but its still very loud. I also don`t know if the PSU (not stock, a 250-300w PSU) would be up to par.

How are you going to overclock on a Dell OEM motherboard?!

Thats a nice question. I got to know its not possible. I bought a 3.2ghz Pentium D 935. I`m wondering if getting a graphics card in a short future would be also interesting.

Going by what you wrote you're using the machine for, I don't think you would benefit much from adding a dedicated graphics card. But getting it to work with your oddball OS... that process itself might still turn out be a weekend of fun. Whether that's worth it is for you to decide.

elszgensa wrote on 2024-02-29, 03:45:

Going by what you wrote you're using the machine for, I don't think you would benefit much from adding a dedicated graphics card. But getting it to work with your oddball OS... that process itself might still turn out be a weekend of fun. Whether that's worth it is for you to decide.

I believe tribblix has packages even for 3DFX drivers from sun solaris 8 and 9. The ABI is strong in backwards compatibility. Its a potentially fun experiment for others to go even older than my machine, as there are old 32-bit isos to download

You'd get much more benefit from a better CPU. Even moving to a C2D would net you 2x-3x in performance.

Also, I don't understand what your driver not loading has to do with bitrot. Surely you can obtain another copy of it.

kingcake wrote on 2024-02-29, 03:54:

You'd get much more benefit from a better CPU. Even moving to a C2D would net you 2x-3x in performance.

Also, I don't understand what your driver not loading has to do with bitrot. Surely you can obtain another copy of it.

I think there must be some issue with the i945 driver port for illumos on older machines, maybe some code mantaining issue. For some reason, openindiana (another illumos distribution) also fails to load the driver. I tested this machine in BSD and in linux distributions with liveUSBs, and both load the driver.

VivienM wrote on 2024-02-29, 00:20:

Eduardolucas1 wrote on 2024-02-28, 17:02:

I really like netburst due to this single-core performance and especially for retro reasons. i currently daily use the machine for everything, but i wonder if getting something like the 64-bit 3.6 or 3.8 ghz pentium 4`s compatible with socket 775 would be fun, especially for overclocking. I just feel the cooling may not be up to par. I run stock cooling and the machine is let open daily to help cooling, but its still very loud. I also don`t know if the PSU (not stock, a 250-300w PSU) would be up to par.

How are you going to overclock on a Dell OEM motherboard?!

Well you can pinmod a 533 CPU to 800, but that's about it... and you need to know it can do that.

As someone who also uses a Pentium 4 (Prescott 2.8 GHz, though in 32-bit & s478 flavor) on a daily basis for the web / daily driver, I find it hard to believe that you can watch 1080p @ 60 FPS and not get stutter. Even with MP4 / H.264 compression in MVK, I can't get 1080p @ 30 FPS without stutter. I've tested numerous other P4 systems (some Cedar Mill too) and they didn't fare much better compared to my P4. The last one I tested was a 3.4 GHz 651. That one was just barely able to handle the same 1080p 30 FPS clip I use for testing on all of my retro machines. As for browsing, same machine did considerably better than my 2.8 GHz P4, though I suspect much of that had to do with the fact that I was using latest version of Firefox at the time on the 651, whereas the 2.8 Presshot was using the Pale Moon -based version of Mypal.

In any case, my point is not to disprove your claim here. But having used various P4 systems, I think you will find the upgrade from 3 to 3.6-3.8 GHz somewhat marginal. Most you might see a difference in is offline video decoding (again, noting my experiments above with the same 1080p 30 FPS clip.) A discrete GPU with H.264 decoding should help off-load the CPU a little with online videos, but don't expect miracles. On for that matter, no need to go with a high-end or even mid-range GPU. Something like a low-end GT730 or Radeon HD7570 should be enough for this task.

And as the others have noted, this being an OEM (Dell) machine, you likely won't be able to do any overclocking. Though I shall note that I ran across a forum member in another forum that showed overcloking is possible on OEM machines with software like ThrottleStop. I remember reading a little bit on it at the time (since I have a lot of OEM machines at home), but gave up on the idea, since it wasn't a very neat solution from what I remember.

Lastly, in regard to the PSU: there's not that much of a difference in TDP between the various single-core Cedar Mill CPUs. So your cooling and PSU may be OK as-is. Though the bit you mentioned that your PSU is *not* the original OEM one worries me somewhat more - OEM PSUs in these Optiplex machines were usually very well-built and could provide the power stated on their label (it's just that too many of them suffered from bad caps after a decade.) On the other hand, a low-end / no-name non-OEM 250-300W PSU could be quite terrible in terms of build quality, and I would be worried about using such PSU on a P4 PC already.

momaka wrote on 2024-02-29, 13:31:

As someone who also uses a Pentium 4 (Prescott 2.8 GHz, though in 32-bit & s478 flavor) on a daily basis for the web / daily driver, I find it hard to believe that you can watch 1080p @ 60 FPS and not get stutter. Even with MP4 / H.264 compression in MVK, I can't get 1080p @ 30 FPS without stutter. I've tested numerous other P4 systems (some Cedar Mill too) and they didn't fare much better compared to my P4. The last one I tested was a 3.4 GHz 651. That one was just barely able to handle the same 1080p 30 FPS clip I use for testing on all of my retro machines. As for browsing, same machine did considerably better than my 2.8 GHz P4, though I suspect much of that had to do with the fact that I was using latest version of Firefox at the time on the 651, whereas the 2.8 Presshot was using the Pale Moon -based version of Mypal.

I suppose, as from hearing about mypal, that you are running windows XP? I believe the performance of cpu decoding on XP may be a lot different from the performance in illumos, like apple and oranges. I run all the videos on 64-bit, updated, pale moon. I believe the GUI makes it also hard to compare as it affects performance. I use CDE and the OS boots around 100-150mb of ram usage (there are factors like ZFS caching which impact that and the FMA daemon which is 30mb in size, sort of a fault tolerance module which registers anomalies in the system)

I`ve tested linux in the past in this machine and videos hanged a lot.

Eduardolucas1 wrote on 2024-02-29, 04:00:

kingcake wrote on 2024-02-29, 03:54:

You'd get much more benefit from a better CPU. Even moving to a C2D would net you 2x-3x in performance.

Also, I don't understand what your driver not loading has to do with bitrot. Surely you can obtain another copy of it.

I think there must be some issue with the i945 driver port for illumos on older machines, maybe some code mantaining issue. For some reason, openindiana (another illumos distribution) also fails to load the driver. I tested this machine in BSD and in linux distributions with liveUSBs, and both load the driver.

You like to live on the dangerous side when it comes to OSes... 😀 I tried OpenIndiana a while ago under VirtualBox; you'd think a Solaris-based OS should play nicely under what was a Sun-owned virtualization platform, but I couldn't get it running happily. On bare metal you'd think it'd be even more challenging to have the right hardware...

VivienM wrote on 2024-02-29, 22:53:

Eduardolucas1 wrote on 2024-02-29, 04:00:

kingcake wrote on 2024-02-29, 03:54:

You'd get much more benefit from a better CPU. Even moving to a C2D would net you 2x-3x in performance.

Also, I don't understand what your driver not loading has to do with bitrot. Surely you can obtain another copy of it.

I think there must be some issue with the i945 driver port for illumos on older machines, maybe some code mantaining issue. For some reason, openindiana (another illumos distribution) also fails to load the driver. I tested this machine in BSD and in linux distributions with liveUSBs, and both load the driver.

You like to live on the dangerous side when it comes to OSes... 😀 I tried OpenIndiana a while ago under VirtualBox; you'd think a Solaris-based OS should play nicely under what was a Sun-owned virtualization platform, but I couldn't get it running happily. On bare metal you'd think it'd be even more challenging to have the right hardware...

I think its a lot hard than it may seem to run it bare metal if you do not have any reference of what kind of hardware may fit. There is a hardware compatibility list in openindiana website which works to find old hardware from the 2000s which will be usable. I wonder if the harder difficulty with virtualbox isn`t with how oracle just dropped solaris from its radar.

The Pentium D 935 cpu has arrived. I feel something like a 150 to 200% increase in performance. Maybe software and current OSes are better optimized to take advantage of two netburst cores instead of one and of the extra 2mb cache, the 200mhz extra on each core, and 800mhz fsb. It realy feels a lot faster.

I think you've got double the cache per core as well. Linux was a lot quicker taking advantage of dual cores than windows OS, so even a dual PII will do better than a single where even in NT OSes you have to be doing something specific really or set core affinity carefully, until things got more vigorously and opportunistically multithreaded under windoze in the late noughts.

Linux took advantage of dual cores right from the off - it had supported multiple processor systems (and MANY multiple processors) for a long time.

I'm not surprised you've seen such a big speedup.

The scheduler will happily run all of those processes on as many 'cpus' as it finds.

Look at the output of 'ps aux' or 'top' - even an idle system running just a shell has dozens of not hundreds of processes. Windows is the same these days. They all need a slice of cpu time. Going to dual processor or dual core and you have effectively given twice the available time slices to all those running jobs, you will never get twice the power (unless a job runs multiple threads), but you absolutely do feel the system is anywhere up to twice as responsive.

I've ran Linux since about 1993, and the dual P3-450 system I replaced my previous single CPU system in circa mid 1999 was an absolute revelation.

Obviously the same applies to most of the other x86 unix variants.

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-03-02, 08:37:

Linux took advantage of dual cores right from the off - it had supported multiple processor systems (and MANY multiple processor […]
Show full quote

Linux took advantage of dual cores right from the off - it had supported multiple processor systems (and MANY multiple processors) for a long time.

I'm not surprised you've seen such a big speedup.

The scheduler will happily run all of those processes on as many 'cpus' as it finds.

Look at the output of 'ps aux' or 'top' - even an idle system running just a shell has dozens of not hundreds of processes. Windows is the same these days. They all need a slice of cpu time. Going to dual processor or dual core and you have effectively given twice the available time slices to all those running jobs, you will never get twice the power (unless a job runs multiple threads), but you absolutely do feel the system is anywhere up to twice as responsive.

I've ran Linux since about 1993, and the dual P3-450 system I replaced my previous single CPU system in circa mid 1999 was an absolute revelation.

Obviously the same applies to most of the other x86 unix variants.

The "do one thing and do it well" philosophy of *nix really leant itself to multi-cpu/core early on. You had many small processes running that the scheduler could juggle. In Windows world it was the opposite. You'd have tons of complex functionality in one giant monolithic process.