Hey all!

Been lurking about for a while and have build, benchmarked, and overclocked a fair range of Pentium 4 systems for interest. All my various benchmark figures I'm hoping to share once I have a few more systems benchmarked and running, but wanted to share my current stage of the build for my Windows 98 Pentium 4 machine! Windows 95 and 98 are the OS's I have the most nostalgia for, and the games of that era were when I really started to get into PC gaming in my teenage years. I'd started my retro gaming journey with some consoles quite some years ago, and about 3 years ago started the journey with my Windows 98 build. The machine started its life as a socket 478, 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 with a Radeon 9250 GPU, but has grown quite a bit from there. The current build is:

CPU: Pentium 4 661 - LGA775 3.6Ghz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800Mhz FSB CURRENT OVERCLOCK: 4.24Ghz
Cooler: Cougar 240mm AiO Water cooling
Motherboard: Asrock 775i65G
GPU: Asus Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB 256bit Memory Bus AGP8x CURRENT OVERCLOCK: 425.25Mhz GPU, 357.75Mhz Memory
GPU Cooler: Zalman VGA Cooler
RAM: 2x Hynix 256MB DDR400
Storage: Western Digital 120GB SATA SSD
Sound: Sound Blaster LIVE! 5.1 PCI
Networking: Linksys WMP54G Wifi PCI
Media Drives: Samsung DVD drive
Peripherals: Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick
8ware 65% PS/2 Keyboard
Casecom PS/2 Optical Mouse
Case: Fractal Design
PSU: Antec 650W
OS: Windows 98 with 2ME

I think the CPU definitely has some more to give, but any kind of big jump I think it is not getting enough voltage and its crashing. So next step is to perform a voltage mod on the CPU, and keep cranking up the base clock. At its current OC it doesn't crack 50C, so I think given how hot P4s can run, it's definitely got some headroom. Assuming I dont mess up the V-Mod and destroy my CPU, I'll be sure to update it 😀

Below are my current benchmarks as well

AquaMark 3: GFX - 6336 CPU - 10720 Total - 48901
3DMark 99 Max: 3dMarks - 25837 CPU - 58596
3DMark 2000: 25155
3DMark 2001SE: 21686

GLQuake (v0.97): 1200FPS
Quake 2 (@1024x768, OpenGL, Max settings): 837FPS
Quake 3 Arena (@1024x768, Max settings): 355FPS
Unreal Gold (@640x480): 355FPS
Unreal Gold (@1024x768): 298FPS
Unreal Tournament (@1024x768, Max settings): 185FPS
Unreal Tournament 2004 (@1024x768, Max settings, Assault map): 60FPS
Unreal Tournament 2004 (@1600x1200, Max settings, Assault map): 58FPS

Keen to hear your thoughts, any advice on different benchmarks to run would be greatly appreciated, or anything else that tends to be run as it would be great to do some comparisons as I have quite a few CPUs and systems that might be interesting to see a matrix of benchmarks on (got a few P4s from 1.6 Ghz up to this one, an E7500, and a Pentium D 3.4) and hoping to track down a few other CPUs to try before maybe branching into the AMD systems 😀