The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-01-04, 14:35:

Pentium 4 671/Pentium D 960. Both HT and multi-core can be disabled by many motherboards. Trying to find one without these features is pointless due to that.

I'm sorry that I forgot to mention; I ask for Socket 478. These are LGA 775 I guess.

Even simpler - Pentium 4 Extreme. Good luck finding it for a decent price =P

I'd say the fastest NetBurst CPU is the Xeon 5080. Socket 771, 3.73 GHz, two cores and SMT (that's four threads!). Put two of these on a multicpu motherboard and you will have 4 cores and 8 threads.

This doesn't help...but the best Pentium 4....is an Athlon 64.
Just saying.

^ It has some few advantages over the Athlon 64 though, having a platform with reliable chipsets and in workloads when SSE2 is heavily used (video encoding for example) and larger L2 cache in later iterations of the NetBurst.

Many people derided it due to deviating much from the P6 micro-architecture, prioritizing CPU clock speed over IPC and having terrible power consumption at the time.

deksar wrote on 2023-01-04, 13:51:

Bump but, here goes an another question; what's the fastest Pentium CPU WITHOUT Hyper Threading support?

Trying to find the fastest CPU (for Win98SE) but a proper/correct one, as Windows 98 doesn't use second core/HT at all. (And it's been said that, Win98 cannot suspend the cores at all, causing all cores (any other inactive ones) running at 100% load?)

That would be 2,8 P4 😀 I use it in a Retro PC with Wondows98/ME on a Asus P4T-E with a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and a Voodoo5 PCI

My favourite Retro PC in my Retro PlayStation

3.4Ghz Northwood is the best for high end Win98 gaming.