momaka wrote on 2026-05-30, 08:22:

If it really does seem like a reasonable price, then I'd say go for it. (Though I am curious what this "reasonable price" is, as […]
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crapasanya wrote on 2026-05-29, 14:12:

The fastest I have found at a reasonable price in my country is the 2.0 512KB 400MHz P4 . Should I buy it?

If it really does seem like a reasonable price, then I'd say go for it.
(Though I am curious what this "reasonable price" is, as I'd like to see/compare it to what I can find here locally. 😀 )

About 15 years ago, I used to find a lot of P4 systems thrown away on the street (I was living in the US then.) One such came with a 1.7 GHz Willamate - basically nearly the same thing as your CPU (same FSB and L2 cache). I put XP SP2 and used this system for a while as a replacement for my 1.4 GHz Duron Applebred PC. Compared to the 1.4 GHz Duron Applebred (with its measly 92 Kb of L2 cache), the 1.7 GHz P4 did feel noticeably faster, particularly in Half-Life 2 -based games I was playing at the time - mostly HL2 DM (and I see some Half-Life 2 action on your screeshots too, so I can relate here 😁 ). In particular, I was mostly getting around 20 FPS on average at 640x480 windowed mode on my Duron PC (though that was also partly due to the crappy Radeon 9200 SE I was using too.) When I jumped to the 1.7 GHz Willy, I basically managed more or less the same FPS (again, mainly a limitation of the Radeon 9200 SE), but the dips in FPS in HL2 DM (particularly when there was a lot of object physics involved) weren't anywhere as terrible as they were with the 1.4 Duron. With the Duron, I'd regularly see dips as low as 11 FPS when many wooden crates/boxes broke. With the Willy, I never dipped below 15. I realize these are laughable numbers nowadays (and even back then they were), but being a low-spec gamer most of my life 🤣, I can tell you that every frame counts once you dip below 20.

Then I found an nVidia GeForce FX5600 card for cheap ($5). I put that in and -WOAH- I could now up the resolution to 800x600 while maintaining the same or better FPS... often hoovering around 25's (whereas with the Radeon 9200 SE, this was mostly in the low 20's and at lower 640x480 resolution.)

Then I found another P4 system - this one with a completely dead motherboard, but with a working 2.0 GHz P4 Northwood. So I swapped the 1.7 GHz Willy for the 2 GHz NWood. The system felt faster yet again, but not as large a jump when I switched from the 1.4 GHz Duron to the 1.7 GHz P4 Willy. Mainly it was the low FPS dips that improved again, very rarely dropping below 18 at the same spots that I saw 15. Again, these are small improvements, but not insignificant. Come to think of it, these FPS numbers do match the CPU upgrade... with the 2 GHz Northwood indeed being 20% faster than the 1.7 Willy just based on the core speeds (in practice, probably even more due to twice the cache.)

So the upgrade from the 1.7 Willy to the 2.0 NWood was worthwhile IMO. Actually, the other unsaid upgrade is that the 1.7 GHz Willy was quite hot and power hungry - about 80W TDP under full load / gaming. The 2.0 GHz NWood not only was slightly faster but also ran much much cooler due to using around 65W or less when gaming. So it was a win-win in my book.. and even more so to my motherboard, since it's one of those rarities that does not have a P4 12V CPU connector. Therefore, my PSU was also happier. Basically, once I swapped the 1.7 Willy for the 2.0 NW, everything in the entire system ran significantly cooler.

Given that your motherboard has bad caps already (and you really should change them sooner rather than "later" 😀 ), upgrading your 1.8 GHz Willy to a 2 GHz NWood, you'd probably reduce the stress on the board significantly. So if you intend to keep the board long term, I think the 2 GHz P4 would come as a small but not insignificant upgrade, both in terms of performance and heat reduction.

In regards to recapping your board... I see it has a mix of good caps brands and known bad cap brands. The purple/dark blue caps with "X" -shaped vents that are bulging around the CPU area appear to be either OST RLX or perhaps GSC/Evercon LE/ME. Those are really the only ones you need to change, though. The caps with the "T" -shaped vent on top are Matsushita/Panasonic and can be left alone (and those are probably all that's holding your board together from stopping itself to work.) I also see the rest of the board appears to use Rubycon caps, so those can stay too.

Your PSU is another hardware item I feel uneasy about as I can't recognize who's its manufacturer. It looks very cheap, though. The lack of real safety certificates on its label screams "full of crappy caps and ready to blow up at any moment's notice". Might want to look into it or replace it eventually (but again, probably sooner rather than "later" 😉 ).

The case looks nice, though - actually very era-appropriate too with the missing bay covers, hehe.

The monitor - I have its bigger brother/cousin here: a 19" SyncMaster 910 or 920 or something like that... in silver. It's missing 3 of the control buttons on the front, though, so not in a as-pretty state as yours. But hey, it was a dumpster find, so I can't complain. Just needed a few caps changed to get going.

Now the JBL speakers... those I think we all approve of (I actually envy 😀 ) - very nice!

P.S. To further play detectives with the pictures here... I see you got schuko wall plugs and wallpaper, so can I safely assume you're somewhere in central or eastern Europe? 😁

There are only two types of listings locally for P4: 1$ used but hard to find and 100$ new but expensive. 100 is too much for me, and for 1$, there aren't too much of them left on the market.

So, after a couple of free evenings spent sorting through poorly written listings, I found two options for cheap: SL6PF (2.8/512/533) and SL725 (2.8/512/533), both appear to be a Northwood ones. Is it worth to get one of these instead of 2.00 Northwood that is already on the way to me? I suspect so, but not really sure.

Yeah, I also used to see (and rescue) a lot of 286-P4 systems and servers like NCR-3000, but since my storage was flooded several times over the years, they all require some work.

Yeah, I thought about "regutting" that PSU, but when I disassembled it, I haven' found any bulging or leaking caps. I've noticed that brown moisture absorbing glue, but PSU tested fine, so I decided to let it alone.

For a monitor i found NEC 1970NX, exactly the same as I had back in the time. But I ordered a donor with white housing for it to match my PC Case.

About these JBL speakers - the sound REALLY nice, especially connected to my 20cm Samsung sub from old but good home theater. End they are very deep but narrow so they don't take a lot of desk space.

That holes on the front are temporary, untill i get back my HP DDS2 streamer from replacement of missing SCSI pin, test and install almost the same Colorado Jumbo streamer as I had in it (previous one got some massive rust and water damage), Fujitsu Magneto-optical drive reapired (see photo of its chip's legs' damage), and (hopefully) fix at least one of my Zip 100 drives.

And lastly - yes, I live in post Soviet country, so ebay never been here.

P.S. Does this Cisco mean this PC Case was part of some fancy Cisco system? I suspect this pc was scrapped from something related to government infrastracture, so...

crapasanya wrote on 2026-05-31, 22:48:

So, after a couple of free evenings spent sorting through poorly written listings, I found two options for cheap: SL6PF (2.8/512/533) and SL725 (2.8/512/533), both appear to be a Northwood ones. Is it worth to get one of these instead of 2.00 Northwood that is already on the way to me? I suspect so, but not really sure.

Both of these are 533 FSB chips, the MB is 400 FSB, the most likely result of putting these CPUs into the MB is that they simply wouldn't work. The less likely possibility is that they would work, but with 400 FSB, the Core Clock Multiplier of P4s are locked down in the upper direction, so even if they work it would result in 2.1-2.2Ghz core performance, extremely tiny improvement above 2.00 Ghz. Also note for the SL725, that is a Mobile Pentium 4(https://www.cpu-world.com/sspec/SL/SL725.html), even less likely to work in a desktop MB.

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-05-31, 23:49:

crapasanya wrote on 2026-05-31, 22:48:

So, after a couple of free evenings spent sorting through poorly written listings, I found two options for cheap: SL6PF (2.8/512/533) and SL725 (2.8/512/533), both appear to be a Northwood ones. Is it worth to get one of these instead of 2.00 Northwood that is already on the way to me? I suspect so, but not really sure.

Both of these are 533 FSB chips, the MB is 400 FSB, the most likely result of putting these CPUs into the MB is that they simply wouldn't work. The less likely possibility is that they would work, but with 400 FSB, the Core Clock Multiplier of P4s are locked down in the upper direction, so even if they work it would result in 2.1-2.2Ghz core performance, extremely tiny improvement above 2.00 Ghz. Also note for the SL725, that is a Mobile Pentium 4(https://www.cpu-world.com/sspec/SL/SL725.html), even less likely to work in a desktop MB.

Thanks for pointing this out. I thought 533MHz CPUs will just downclock itself on 400MHz boards. Luckily, turns out that the one I already ordered is 400MHz FSB one. I will continue sarch for better ones, but for now, i hope, it'll give me at least some more performance paired with FX5700 Ultra i found in scrap pile and successfuly "repaired" by "baking" its gpu on IR soldering station (not mine) for cheap.

crapasanya wrote on 2026-06-01, 15:37:

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-05-31, 23:49:

crapasanya wrote on 2026-05-31, 22:48:

So, after a couple of free evenings spent sorting through poorly written listings, I found two options for cheap: SL6PF (2.8/512/533) and SL725 (2.8/512/533), both appear to be a Northwood ones. Is it worth to get one of these instead of 2.00 Northwood that is already on the way to me? I suspect so, but not really sure.

Both of these are 533 FSB chips, the MB is 400 FSB, the most likely result of putting these CPUs into the MB is that they simply wouldn't work. The less likely possibility is that they would work, but with 400 FSB, the Core Clock Multiplier of P4s are locked down in the upper direction, so even if they work it would result in 2.1-2.2Ghz core performance, extremely tiny improvement above 2.00 Ghz. Also note for the SL725, that is a Mobile Pentium 4(https://www.cpu-world.com/sspec/SL/SL725.html), even less likely to work in a desktop MB.

Thanks for pointing this out. I thought 533MHz CPUs will just downclock itself on 400MHz boards. Luckily, turns out that the one I already ordered is 400MHz FSB one. I will continue sarch for better ones, but for now, i hope, it'll give me at least some more performance paired with FX5700 Ultra i found in scrap pile and successfuly "repaired" by "baking" its gpu on IR soldering station (not mine) for cheap.

The FX5700 Ultra is a quite okay-ish companion GPU for a Northwood, they had a bad reputation because of their bad cost-to-performance ratio and somewhat larger power consumption than ATIs competing 9xxx series, but if it works reliable after the repair the machine should be able to play some games from the era reasonably well, for example Doom 3(The original version, not the marine realised that duct-tape exists but otherwise inferior BFG edition 😁) most likely run acceptably, the slow FSB is not perfect, but "Medium" quality setting with Doom 3 should be possible with the system paired with that GPU(Just close every other program as 768MB is a bit tight if other things run in the background, even "High" can be attempted, but as the Card has 128MB onboard memory the slow memory interface from the motherboard most likely cause stuttering when textures needs to be loaded).

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-06-01, 17:07:

crapasanya wrote on 2026-06-01, 15:37:

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-05-31, 23:49:

Both of these are 533 FSB chips, the MB is 400 FSB, the most likely result of putting these CPUs into the MB is that they simply wouldn't work. The less likely possibility is that they would work, but with 400 FSB, the Core Clock Multiplier of P4s are locked down in the upper direction, so even if they work it would result in 2.1-2.2Ghz core performance, extremely tiny improvement above 2.00 Ghz. Also note for the SL725, that is a Mobile Pentium 4(https://www.cpu-world.com/sspec/SL/SL725.html), even less likely to work in a desktop MB.

Thanks for pointing this out. I thought 533MHz CPUs will just downclock itself on 400MHz boards. Luckily, turns out that the one I already ordered is 400MHz FSB one. I will continue sarch for better ones, but for now, i hope, it'll give me at least some more performance paired with FX5700 Ultra i found in scrap pile and successfuly "repaired" by "baking" its gpu on IR soldering station (not mine) for cheap.

The FX5700 Ultra is a quite okay-ish companion GPU for a Northwood, they had a bad reputation because of their bad cost-to-performance ratio and somewhat larger power consumption than ATIs competing 9xxx series, but if it works reliable after the repair the machine should be able to play some games from the era reasonably well, for example Doom 3(The original version, not the marine realised that duct-tape exists but otherwise inferior BFG edition 😁) most likely run acceptably, the slow FSB is not perfect, but "Medium" quality setting with Doom 3 should be possible with the system paired with that GPU(Just close every other program as 768MB is a bit tight if other things run in the background, even "High" can be attempted, but as the Card has 128MB onboard memory the slow memory interface from the motherboard most likely cause stuttering when textures needs to be loaded).

Thanks. Will HD3650 be better than FX5700 Ultra? I'm planning to sell FX5700 Ulta because here they cost around 300-400$, and HD3650 AGP cost around 25$.

crapasanya wrote on 2026-06-01, 21:13:

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-06-01, 17:07:

crapasanya wrote on 2026-06-01, 15:37:

Thanks for pointing this out. I thought 533MHz CPUs will just downclock itself on 400MHz boards. Luckily, turns out that the one I already ordered is 400MHz FSB one. I will continue sarch for better ones, but for now, i hope, it'll give me at least some more performance paired with FX5700 Ultra i found in scrap pile and successfuly "repaired" by "baking" its gpu on IR soldering station (not mine) for cheap.

The FX5700 Ultra is a quite okay-ish companion GPU for a Northwood, they had a bad reputation because of their bad cost-to-performance ratio and somewhat larger power consumption than ATIs competing 9xxx series, but if it works reliable after the repair the machine should be able to play some games from the era reasonably well, for example Doom 3(The original version, not the marine realised that duct-tape exists but otherwise inferior BFG edition 😁) most likely run acceptably, the slow FSB is not perfect, but "Medium" quality setting with Doom 3 should be possible with the system paired with that GPU(Just close every other program as 768MB is a bit tight if other things run in the background, even "High" can be attempted, but as the Card has 128MB onboard memory the slow memory interface from the motherboard most likely cause stuttering when textures needs to be loaded).

Thanks. Will HD3650 be better than FX5700 Ultra? I'm planning to sell FX5700 Ulta because here they cost around 300-400$, and HD3650 AGP cost around 25$.

The HD3650 is a design from 5 years later, it is better in basically every possible metric than the FX5700 Ultra, for a single point of comparison, the minimum memory size of the HD3650 is 256 MB, double of the FX5700 Ultra and there are versions with 512MB and 1GB memory available too, if you go with the HD3650 then you will be basically processor limited in every game as the GPU is just that much more powerful, it is literally a later generation video card compared to the FX5700 Ultra(Or the Radeon 9600 mentioned in your opening post).

However do note that HD3650 is originally a PCIe design and the AGP version was basically made with the inclusion of a AGP-to-PCIe bridge chip, so there is a possibility that running it on an older AGP motherboard like the IBM NetVista 49P4384 will cause issues, so check if it works in the system before committing to use it. And also note that the minimum officially supported Windows version for the HD3650 is Windows XP, I don't think there was ever an official driver for HD3650 for older versions of Windows.

crapasanya wrote on 2026-05-31, 22:48:

And lastly - yes, I live in post Soviet country, so ebay never been here.

Im also from post Iron Curtain country with 45 years of russian occupation and ebay works no problem. The only exception where ebay doesnt operate right now are russia and belarus for obvious reasons..

crapasanya wrote on 2026-06-01, 21:13:

Thanks. Will HD3650 be better than FX5700 Ultra? I'm planning to sell FX5700 Ulta because here they cost around 300-400$, and HD3650 AGP cost around 25$.

for comparison. the same 3dmark 2003 benchmark...

The Gainward FX5700 Ultra "Golden Sample", (benchmarking was done at 1024 x 768)
Test Setup 1 , AMD XP2100+ (Thoroughbred “B”), running at 2200MHz (200 x 11), Abit NF7-S v2.0
Test Setup 2, Intel P4 1.6A (Northwood), running at 2400MHz (150 x 16), Abit IC7 v1.0

https://www.overclockers.com/gainward-nvidia-fx5700-ultra/
3dmark 2003 (AMD) , 3892 points
3dmark 2003 (intel) , 3895 points

The Powercolor Radeon HD3650 512Mb
(benchmarking at 1024 x 768)
Test Setup, Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33 GHz, Gigabyte P35C-DS3R
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/powercolor … hd-3650/18.html
3dmark 2003 (intel) , 15200 points

crapasanya wrote on 2026-06-01, 21:13:

Thanks. Will HD3650 be better than FX5700 Ultra? I'm planning to sell FX5700 Ulta because here they cost around 300-400$, and HD3650 AGP cost around 25$.

Same platform, HD 3650 can be faster than HD 2600 XT but not always (depends on memory speed and type used for both).

Here's 3DMark 2k numbers :
HD 2600 XT AGP = 33120 points
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra = 22654 points

And Far Cry (in OpenGL mode) :
HD 2600 XT AGP = 165,67 FPS (Avg.)
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra = 116,61 FPS (Avg.)

Screenshots
3DMark 2k :

Far Cry (OpenGL) :

Can provide few more scores if you want/need them.