The Pentium D is basically 2 Pentium 4 on the same package whithout HyperThreading

The big problem with the Pentium D is that most motherboards that supports it also supports some of the early Core 2 Duos.
Only boards with 955X chipset, some early i945 boards and perhaps some VIA/SIS chipsets has the Pentium D as the best upgrade path.

i915 and 925X(E) dosnt support the Pentium D at all
Its a bit strange that the older i865PE chipset supports pretty much all CPUs up to Core 2 Quads as long as the boards are socket 775 and a new BIOS exist.

alexanrs wrote:

The Pentium D is basically 2 Pentium 4 on the same package whithout HyperThreading

Not entirely true; there are Pentium Ds with HyperThreading and Pentium 4s without. 😊

Pentium D is Intel's first attempt at a dual-core, but unlike the Core * series and later developments, the Pentium D isn't a unified cache design. So you have a pair of NetBurst cores sharing the same package, what is known as a multi-core module (or MCM), and communicating with one another via the FSB. This isn't too dissimilar from a dual socket system, except you don't have any of the licencing or hardware limitations that a dual-socket imposes (many dual-socket NetBurst platforms can only accept DDR333, and you are required to use an operating system that is licenced for 2P, such as Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional, or Windows Vista Business; Pentium D will work with any operating system that supports SMP, such as Windows XP Home, Windows Vista Home, etc). There's also potential motherboard advantages, since there are CrossFire and SLI compatible boards that will take Pentium D, but I'm not aware of any Socket 604 boards that do SLI or CF.

Performance-wise it really depends on your application as to whether or not a Pentium D is better than a Pentium 4. A lot of games from their era are primarily or exclusively dependent on single-core performance, so there will be little to no advantage to the P-D. However if you're also wanting to run a newer operating system (like Vista), or do a lot of multimedia stuff (like video encoding), or play somewhat newer games that benefit from or require multi-core (like Supreme Commander, Fallout: New Vegas, etc) the P-D can have advantages over the P4. Keep Skyscraper's point in mind though - many boards that take P-D will also take Core 2, and Core 2 is generally faster and uses less power and should thus run cooler.

Something else worth mentioning: while the Pentium D is a dual-core CPU, the similarly-named Celeron D *IS NOT*. The Celeron D is a Prescott Celeron, and they are only available as single-core chips. They aren't bad alternatives to the Pentium 4, as they'll still have SSE3 support, high clocks, and generally are compatible with any board that can work with Prescott. They also tend to run somewhat cooler. The trade-off is they have less cache, and will thus not be as fast in some applications. One advantage is they also lack Hyper-Threading entirely, so if you're wanting to use an OS that doesn't support HT you don't have to worry about disabling it.

Finally: Just as with the later Pentium 4, there are a couple of iterations of the Pentium D, with the latest and "best" variants supporting VT. If that matters for your application, check ARK to confirm which SKUs provide VT.

I'm not a big fan of the Pentium D. They work well as space heaters though. 🤣

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I'm not a big fan of the Pentium D. They work well as space heaters though. 🤣

Pretty much describes all P4s

They aren't bad alternatives to the Pentium 4, as they'll still have SSE3 support, high clocks, and generally are compatible with any board that can work with Prescott. They also tend to run somewhat cooler. The trade-off is they have less cache, and will thus not be as fast in some applications. One advantage is they also lack Hyper-Threading entirely, so if you're wanting to use an OS that doesn't support HT you don't have to worry about disabling it.

They are terrible processors. Like a Pentium 4 only even slower (if you can believe that)
P4 is cache hungry so a cut down cache P4 isn't a good deal. And they do run hot. I know that for a fact.

Only the first generation Pentium D (8xx) has 2MB cache and runs hot, the Pentium D 9xx has 4MB cache and does not run hot at all, at least not until overclocked. They are pretty much exactly as fast as Prescotts running single threaded stuff and perhaps 60-70% faster in threaded stuff. Compared to E8X00 Core 2 Duo they are about half the speed clock for clock.

The big issue is that they do not work in many of the Prescott boards as they often used i915 or i925X(E) which dosnt support any dual core CPUs.

smeezekitty wrote:

Pretty much describes all P4s […]
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mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I'm not a big fan of the Pentium D. They work well as space heaters though. 🤣

Pretty much describes all P4s

They aren't bad alternatives to the Pentium 4, as they'll still have SSE3 support, high clocks, and generally are compatible with any board that can work with Prescott. They also tend to run somewhat cooler. The trade-off is they have less cache, and will thus not be as fast in some applications. One advantage is they also lack Hyper-Threading entirely, so if you're wanting to use an OS that doesn't support HT you don't have to worry about disabling it.

They are terrible processors. Like a Pentium 4 only even slower (if you can believe that)
P4 is cache hungry so a cut down cache P4 isn't a good deal. And they do run hot. I know that for a fact.

They are awesome! If you were homeless and there was no computer in sight, a Pentium D would be a blessing. 🤣 It's only due to mass manufacturing we can even look at all these older processors and say "obsolete". I mean one does 50 million math operations a second, and another does 900 million, they can still both be awesome right?

fyy wrote:

smeezekitty wrote:

Pretty much describes all P4s […]
Show full quote

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I'm not a big fan of the Pentium D. They work well as space heaters though. 🤣

Pretty much describes all P4s

They aren't bad alternatives to the Pentium 4, as they'll still have SSE3 support, high clocks, and generally are compatible with any board that can work with Prescott. They also tend to run somewhat cooler. The trade-off is they have less cache, and will thus not be as fast in some applications. One advantage is they also lack Hyper-Threading entirely, so if you're wanting to use an OS that doesn't support HT you don't have to worry about disabling it.

They are terrible processors. Like a Pentium 4 only even slower (if you can believe that)
P4 is cache hungry so a cut down cache P4 isn't a good deal. And they do run hot. I know that for a fact.

They are awesome! If you were homeless and there was no computer in sight, a Pentium D would be a blessing. 🤣 It's only due to mass manufacturing we can even look at all these older processors and say "obsolete". I mean one does 50 million math operations a second, and another does 900 million, they can still both be awesome right?

I was talking about the Celeron D. The Pentium D are slow too but having two cores helps a little with modern software.
I had a Celeron D once and never again

Yea the Celeron D is a horrible CPU.

Skyscraper wrote:

Only the first generation Pentium D (8xx) has 2MB cache and runs hot, the Pentium D 9xx has 4MB cache and does not run hot at all, at least not until overclocked. They are pretty much exactly as fast as Prescotts running single threaded stuff and perhaps 60-70% faster in threaded stuff. Compared to E8X00 Core 2 Duo they are about half the speed clock for clock.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I'm not a big fan of the Pentium D. They work well as space heaters though. 🤣

Pentium D 9xx runs plenty hot as well. I used one up until a few months ago for several years on a Foxconn 945P board that did not accept Core 2 chips (Technically it's possible to modify a VRM10 945P board to accept a Core CPU, but it requires pin modification as well as a BIOS transplant from a similar board that does accept Core CPUs).

I now run a Quad-Core Harpertown Xeon. A lot faster than the Pentium D, but I miss the heat from it that kept me a little warm in the winter.

smeezekitty wrote:

They are terrible processors.

We will just have to agree to disagree on this one. 😀

Honestly it's perfectly fine to irrationally hate a piece of computer hardware, but "fast" vs "slow" is a very relative thing. I wouldn't want a Celeron D (or a Pentium D, or a Pentium 4, or an Athlon64, or anything else that's a decade or more old) to run Windows 10 and play Crysis 5, but for a Windows 98/XP box it'd be less expensive than Pentium III, and considerably faster. Years and years ago I had one as my "main" system, overclocked to around 3.4GHz, and paired with a 6800 Ultra it had no trouble with many DX9c games. It also never broke ~55* C. Was a nifty little chip. 😎

obobskivich wrote:

Honestly it's perfectly fine to irrationally hate a piece of computer hardware, but "fast" vs "slow" is a very relative thing. I wouldn't want a Celeron D (or a Pentium D, or a Pentium 4, or an Athlon64, or anything else that's a decade or more old) to run Windows 10 and play Crysis 5, but for a Windows 98/XP box it'd be less expensive than Pentium III, and considerably faster. Years and years ago I had one as my "main" system, overclocked to around 3.4GHz, and paired with a 6800 Ultra it had no trouble with many DX9c games. It also never broke ~55* C. Was a nifty little chip. 😎

Its not really irrational. It was terribly underpowered for its time.
Mine was a Celeron D 360 3.46GHz STOCK. I used it as a main box
with Windows Vista for about a year (didn't have spare money to upgrade)
and it chugged and chugged and chugged. Even Neverball which is
a very light game would have very low framerate unless I played at 640x480
This was in 2011. The motherboard finally died so I replaced it with
another socket 775 board but this one had the upgrade path to the core 2 series.
I was still stuck with that awful processor for about 2 months and
then I bought a Core2Duo for $30 and never looked back.
Now I have a core 2 quad in the same board and it runs well.

Mine also topped out at 55-57*C --- but that was with the fan revving to 4400RPM
and it revved up to that very often. Even web browsing would do it.

P4 platform, I mostly speak for Intel 865 chipset systems, are very good to work with. They run Windows 98 SE as well as XP, got SATA as well as IDE and are quite stable. Had them running with GeForce 4, FX and Voodoo 2 SLI and worked great.

Performance is overrated as all the games I was interested in playing, e.g. Splinter Cell or Pandora Tomorrow, don't really need a fast processor. Once you run into situations that demand a better processor than a Pentium 4, you're really on a PCIe motherboard and in that case I'm skipping everything retro and using a modern motherboard with i5 processor and various BIOS slow down tricks.

So I entirely skip the high performance Windows XP PCIe retro systems and use my Time Machine approach. Works great for me.

But for an AGP system for Windows 98 SE or XP I can't fault Pentium 4.

I like all Pentium 4 and Pentium D, they are as fast as they need to be.
The Celeron D however isnt a favorite but now I feel like building a system with one just to see how slow it is and if things improve with some tweaking.

philscomputerlab wrote:

They run Windows 98 SE as well as XP

They run MS-DOS/Win 3.x too because ICH5/5R emulates legal devices (IRQ controllers, DMA controllers, 2 floppy drives etc).

mockingbird wrote:

Pentium D 9xx runs plenty hot as well.

By the way, IIRC there was 2 Pentium D 9xx revisions, C1 and D0. The D0 ones are much less heated.

Gamecollector wrote:

They run MS-DOS/Win 3.x too because ICH5/5R emulates legal devices (IRQ controllers, DMA controllers, 2 floppy drives etc). […]
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philscomputerlab wrote:

They run Windows 98 SE as well as XP

They run MS-DOS/Win 3.x too because ICH5/5R emulates legal devices (IRQ controllers, DMA controllers, 2 floppy drives etc).

mockingbird wrote:

Pentium D 9xx runs plenty hot as well.

By the way, IIRC there was 2 Pentium D 9xx revisions, C1 and D0. The D0 ones are much less heated.

Also note that the Pentium D 9x5 do not support VT while the Pention D 9x0 supports VT
I never had any problems with heat with the C1 stepping but I have to admit that I rarly use stock cooling.
The Pentium D 935 and 945 have 95W TDP while the 940, 950 and 960 have 95W or 130W depending on "VR CONFIG"

Skyscraper wrote:

940, 950 and 960 have 95W or 130W depending on "VR CONFIG"

Well, step C1 Pentium D 960 is 05B (130 W) only, step D0 Pentium D 960 is 05A (95 W) only. The choice is obvious. 😀

Gamecollector wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

940, 950 and 960 have 95W or 130W depending on "VR CONFIG"

Well, step C1 Pentium D 960 is 05B (130 W) only, step D0 Pentium D 960 is 05A (95 W) only. The choice is obvious. 😀

Yes but for the 950 the C1 stepping is also 95W.
Avoid the B1 stepping in any case and get the D0 if you can. 😀

All high BINs of the D0 stepping should clock to 4.5 Ghz without much trouble on a decent motherboard... with decent cooling...

smeezekitty wrote:

Even Neverball which is a very light game would have very low framerate unless I played at 640x480

I think the game is 3d accelerated?