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The ISA Pentium 4 3.06 GHz

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First post, by NorsteinB

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Built this the other day:

The attachment WhatsApp Image 2026-08-14 at 11.44.50.jpeg is no longer available
  • Ipox 4GVI83 Motherboard
  • Pentium 4 3.06 GHz (Northwood)
  • ActiveCool A4G-D Peltier Cooler
  • 1024 MB Corsair XMS DDR400 CL2 @333 MHz
  • Geforce FX 5200 64 bit PCI
  • PCI SATA adapter
  • Icybox SATA mobile rack to conceal SSD
  • 120 GB WD Green SATA SSD
  • Creative Sound Blaster 32 CT3670 (with AWE64 chipset and 2x16 MB memory expansion)

I've yet to fix the case temperature display, right now it just lights up every display segment at once, probably the temperature sensor got loose.
I could then see case temperature, HDD temperature and CPU temperature at the same time on the case front.
The Peltier cooler is just a gimmick because I got it for real cheap (15€) NIB, it doesn't actually cool sub ambient but at least the P4 is staying below 40°C.
W98SE is patched to be able to handle a gig of RAM, and Hyperhreading is disabled in BIOS.
Still looking for another sound card to add, maybe one with real OPL3 and a wavetable header, or one with ESFM and a Dream SAM wavetable synthesizer, so I can load sf2 sound fonts on the SB and 94b sound fonts on that.

Also trying to find someone to assemble a few CPU Throttle Blasters for me (can keep one and the rest of the components that I bought too much of), then this PC could be dialed down to all the important CPU performance levels needed for DOS games.

Reply 1 of 5, by wbahnassi

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P4 doesn't have STPCLK pin for ThrottleBlaster to work AFAIK.

Turbo XT 12MHz, EGA, MFM HDD
Intel 386 DX-33, Speedstar 24X, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
IBM BlueLightning 100MHz, CL5428, SB16, 4x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, RTX2060

Reply 2 of 5, by NorsteinB

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wbahnassi wrote on Today, 11:04:

P4 doesn't have STPCLK pin for ThrottleBlaster to work AFAIK.

It does, it is pin Y4.

Reply 3 of 5, by Shponglefan

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Very cool! Always love seeing more Pentium 4 + industrial motherboard setups. IMHO, it's still an underrated retro gaming platform.

If you're looking to throttle the system for DOS, I recommend CPUSPD: CpuSpd - A Hardware Based CPU Speed Control Utility for DOS/Win9X Retro Gaming

It can be used with both ACPI and ODCM throttling. It essentially functions the same as Throttleblaster in that in introduces period halt states similar to what Throttleblaster does. The difference is that ACPI and ODCM throttling uses specific frequency steppings as opposed to Throttleblaster which is more variable.

I've also found that in practice just disabling L1/L2 cache can bring these systems down to 486 DX-33/40 levels of performance which is good enough for a lot of speed sensitive games from the early 90s.

Last edited by Shponglefan on 2026-08-14, 16:00. Edited 1 time in total.

Pentium 4 Multi-OS Build
486 DX4-100 with 6 sound cards
486 DX-33 with 5 sound cards

Reply 5 of 5, by Mike_

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Shponglefan wrote on Today, 15:57:

Very cool! Always love seeing more Pentium 4 + industrial motherboard setups. IMHO, it's still an underrated retro gaming platform.

It's probably the best possible option if you want an all-in-one retro PC, as it can offer both DOS compatibility and more memory bandwidth than KT133A based builds. It's just quite pricey as you said. 😀

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