My first Pentium 4 experience wasn't a good one (Part 1/2)

[@GeomancerHT]

I remember a friend who had a Pentium 4 and mocked my Athlon XP bought on the same era, and we ran benchmarks to compete and the only thing he won was having "free" heating at home. Thanks RetroSpector, amazing quality as always!

[@ian_b]

Still got my Athlon XP though no longer in use, great machine, served me well doing art (comics) in Photoshop. At one point I had 5 60GB HDDs in it- one for the C: drive and then two RAID 1 pairs for data. Great machine :)

[@rodhester2166]

I remember a guy at my work was athlon and I was pentium, he was faster until the heat killed his athlon and his duron , I still have all my pentiums working today.

[@e8root]

Depends on which P4 it was. First P4 were a bust but starting with P4 with HT had better user experience in Windows 2000/XP when you were running a lot of programs at one time and even in situations where you ran one 100% CPU time process P4 with HT didn't choke like as any single thread CPU would, even Athlon 64. Unlike broken dual core implementation of Athlon 64 X2 there were never any compatibility issues with having two threads in the system on Intel processors (which also made Pentium D of all things better choice imho over otherwise obviously superior Athlon X2... what good are two cores when they cause more issues for the users than solve issues anyways?). Also comparing clock vs AMD's PR rating P4s were generally faster, especially these with "800MHz" bus. What really made AMD system better was much much lower price. Athlons were very affordable and even someone like me who could not even afford non-Hyper Threaded P4 could still build nice fast Athlon XP system. Power draw was also higher on P4 but that is more of an issue of price adding more cost to the system for getting good PSU and cooler + additional power costs. During this era I eventually got Athlon XP 2500+@"3200+" and I think such Athlon + nForce 2 motherboard was they way to go for most people. Also non-HT Pentium 4 didn't really give anything for the price _BUT _ if someone had P4 with HT then imho such person had better user experience. Whether these improvements were worth all the added costs is disputable and mostly depends on the use case... and of course the short simple answer is the same as always with overpriced top end products which get obsolete quick: no :)

[@Shmbler]

@@e8root You're very right on the UI. There were many situations with applications causing high CPU load that caused the OS to react sluggish on input events. Dual CPU systems didn't have that issue but were too expensive for home use. But HyperThreading really made a big difference and it was affordable. I remember that when the test machines at work were upgraded with HyperThreading P4's we immediately received an endless amount of hard to pinpoint multithreading bugs that simply did not show up on single thread machines before.

[@jackmclane1826]

Up until a transport on the iffy open die Athlon XP chipped a nick out of it and breaks it. This style of processor was really delicate.

[@6581punk]

I went from a PIII which wasn't great to an AMD Athlon 800. I couldn't figure out why anyone would get a P4, they ran hot and didn't seem to perform well except for video encoding. The main downside to the AMD route at the time was the slightly iffy VIA chipsets on the motherboards.

[@msthalamus2172]

I have an 800 MHz Athlon under my desk right now! :) I use it for ca. 2000 gaming, and I've never had any problems with it. In my experience, the thing about VIA is that their drivers were finicky, but if you have the ones that shipped with your MB, they're typically fine.

[@e8root]

@talldude123 In 2004 you could play all games on it and if you were not then it was because of GPU. The issue with Celeron was that getting much faster AMD system was possible with less money. I had Celeron 1.8GHz@2.2GHz around this time because the CPU was almost for free and it wasn't half bad. More like 1/3 bad compared to random Duron that had even less cache XD Eventually got Athlon XP and also at 2.2GHz the difference in FPS was staggering. On the defense of Celeron: not being able to push as many frames per second made me use higher resolutions in games that I otherwise would so CPU speed didn't matter as much.

[@jari2018]

@@msthalamus2172 You should be able to run a copy of ut2004 (from year 2004) just fine on 800 ( even a duron ) but graphicswise - mini for good experience online in onslaught would be a Ati 9600 ( nvidia 5700 -a generic 300wat powersupply might not do) -both would do .I had a barthon downclocked to like 900, Nvidia 4200 struggled in onslaught - the 9800 did very well ( a nvidia 440 mx could play deathmatch in 640x ,4200 in 800x -a tnt2 would be 320x and low) , Ati 850 (800) no problem anywhere in the game

[@Aruneh]

P4 had its issues, but I don’t think it deserves the bad reputation it has nowadays. I had a couple P4 systems as a kid and never had issues with instability or performance. And my room was never cold either. ;)

[@nneeerrrd]

P4 had this bad reputation from the very beginning. Hot, expensive RAM, much slower than P3 at the same clock.

[@mikeall7012]

It was also behind the curve on 64 bit implementation; which is odd to me since it looks like they were almost all the way there from a bus width standpoint. I remember at this time thinking that AMD was a step ahead Intel on the innovation front. The Athlon series of chips was/is a great set of CPUs and really drove the industry into the next era of x86 baser machines.

[@federicocatelli8785]

@@nneeerrrd very true older p4 (Willamette e Northwood) had several flaws including hilariously expensive memory (the short lived rambus)

[@e8root]

P4 always had bad reputation for being slow overpriced room heaters so it is not a new trend ;)

[@BilisNegra]

@@federicocatelli8785 Northwood? Not really. RAMBUS was pretty much a thing of the Socket 423/Willamette era.

[@bobgrimes8618]

I have two IBM Thinkcentres Pentium 4 HD's, both with 4 gigs ram. I run Manjaro on one and XP on the other. I restored both, repasted the cpus and installed an SSD in both. They run very well.

[@IBM_Museum]

There are a wide multitude of P4 ThinkCentres - even in a couple different form factors - but typically great systems that are well-built. The IBM/Lenovo transition does leave many with harder-to-find support and drivers. Sometimes the CPUs need to be repasted as you said, but I'm glad they typically don't have bad capacitors.

[@bryans8895]

I have nothing but fond memories of the P4, so thanks for reminding me of the little aggravations. That stock black paste almost always yanked the chip, it was always good practice to twist/break the aluminum free before pulling but I’d never have remembered without seeing it happen again. And that heat sink mount, I always pulled the arms away like you did. But you can also slip a screwdriver somewhat through the arm and lever them off for tighter cases and board layouts.

[@UwUSanime]

If it is 20 years or older it is vintage/ retro. If it is 50 years or older it is antique.

[@talvisota327]

@JL85FW socket 423 and 478 are definitely retro in my opinion since they cant really be used anymore for modern stuff and are 32 bit only. later lga 775 p4s can still run the latest version of windows 10 and even windows 11 with some modifications. however using a p4 on 775 doesnt really make sense to me since you can use a way faster core 2 cpu on the same platform

[@procta2343]

@JL85FW you can get windows 10 to work on a P4 but i think as soon as it gets updates, that's it the systems done for. Like running windows XP on a pentium 200 mmx, runs ok but as soon as service packs get added that's it.

[@nashcomp]

@@talvisota327 socket 478 with universal agp slot to be exact, because it runs 3dfx even some older cards.

[@sometwo4097]

I have nothing but fond memories of the P4, so thanks for reminding me of the little aggravations. That stock black paste almost always yanked the chip, it was always good practice to twist/break the aluminum free before pulling but I’d never have remembered without seeing it happen again. And that heat sink mount, I always pulled the arms away like you did. But you can also slip a screwdriver somewhat through the arm and lever them off for tighter cases and board layouts.

[@Kwaq84]

Nope. This is way more dependent on ones emotions and border is fluid. I remember when people considered 386/486 retro when they were just 10-15 years old. I think it may be dependent on performance and capabilities, too. Socket 775 systems are still usable, even today for your basic Internet browsing, despite being about 15 years old now. Latest units with socket T are at least 10 years old, and that might be contributing factor too. Trying to use 486 back in '99 for normal work would be quite a chore.

[@chriswareham]

The Pentium 4 "Netburst" design was an architectural deadend for Intel - they went back and started again from the Pentium 3 when developing the 4's successor.

[@6581punk]

They planned to go up to 10Ghz but it was never to be, too much power and cooling required.

[@anomaly95]

"...they went back and started again from the Pentium 3 when developing the 4's successor." That's a common misconception. The next gen (Core2 series) was independently designed from both the P3 and P4 groups. One of the few things that might have been similar between the P3 and Core2, was going back to a shorter instruction pipeline. For the P4's, having a long instruction pipeline plus a bad branch prediction slowed things down considerably.

[@nneeerrrd]

@@anomaly95 P4 successor was Core. Core 2 was much later. And Core had a lot from P3 in its architecture.

[@312diag]

Pentium M, a version of PIII, was used. The mobile variety ran cooler.

[@dennisp.2147]

Not really. The Core architecture was developed independently and in parallel by a different group.

[@XeonProductions]

I owned multiple revisions of the Pentium 4. The first one I owned I believe ran at 1.8 GHz and was Willamette based, and the later one I owned was a 3 GHz hyper-threaded Prescott that ran hotter than the sun. That hyper threaded one was amazing at the time though, I could finally do multiple things at once without the system turning into a slideshow.

[@annihilatorg]

The easy way to remove the cooler retention clip is to slide a flat head screw driver from the top behind each arm of the clip. A slight twist clears the clip from the bracket. Just don't twist too far or you could break the bracket on the motherboard.

[@RetroSpector78]

Yeah but still its a poorly designed system IMHO.

[@GORF_EMPIRE]

@@RetroSpector78 It really was a tragic mess of a design. Had to deal with that on a regular basis when I built those at a mom and pop shop back in the day.

[@annihilatorg]

@@RetroSpector78 Without question it's horrible. Third party coolers were even worse and frequently broke the bracket (I'm lookin' at you, Zalman!). Just saying that once the OEM clip is free, you can lift the cooler straight up instead of at an angle and can reduce the likelihood of bending pins when the CPU is stuck to the cooler. Very much looking forward to the next video!

[@JARVIS1187]

This is the first mainboard I see which has a jumper for setting the BIOS-operating-type. I just remember flashing my Elitegroup K7S5A with the system restarting without finishing it correctly. The system did not start up anymore. I needed to copy the BIOS file to a floppy disk and hold down CTRL+ALT+Insert for a couple of seconds after starting the "dead" system, which then read and recognized the BIOS-file on the disk and flashed it again. Man, that were some hours of searching and hoping for and chance of reviving my beloved PC.

[@Pillusch]

I would guess the Power Supply killed the Motherboard. That noise at 3:05 ... Ouch :D I heard that before on an old Zalman 600W unit that killed my Core 2 Quad Mainboard in 2008... Nice Video as always! Looking forward to Part 2!

[@bongodoug]

I had a P4 2.4 GHz Dell as my first system. The only problem I ever encountered was user error. Sure, it was a portable heater but it ran all my games really well and started my journey into the world of computers. All these years later I now build systems and have even ran a computer repair shop. To think it all started with that P4. Good (although warm) times.

[@elia04_]

This was interesting to watch. Subbed and clicked the bell!

[@nilz23]

I know some motherboards would look for a bios recovery flashing floppy if something happens to the bios and a floppy drive is attached.

[@msthalamus2172]

I also managed to pull my 3.2 GHz P4 out of its socket by removing its cooler. Something about the way these sockets were made caused them to hold onto the pins very loosely. It took me hours to find and straighten all the bent pins enough to seat the CPU again, but thankfully it worked just fine.

[@RetroSpector78]

Luckily I only lost one redundant pin. System isn’t super stable now (managed to fix the corrupt bios) so will need to investigate that

[@msthalamus2172]

@@RetroSpector78 Yeah, if the CPU isn't receiving all the power it needs-- and P4s need a *lot* of power-- it could certainly result in system instability. Luckily, I think P4s are practically given away on Ebay these days. :)

[@DookNookim]

@1:08 When I have a CPU that's stuck to the heat sink, I use a hair dryer to heat up the heat sink and then I just twist the CPU to get it off. And for bending CPU pins I use an empty mechanical pencil.

[@cee128d]

I have several old Dell Dimension P4 systems sitting here, although I rarely use them. A couple of them have the slightly newer 865 chipset that have an SATA 1 ports build in. One is one of the Rambus models. All of them still work today. I got all of them for free over the years. People just wanted the data pulled off of the hard drives in them to transfer to their new systems and gave the systems to me for doing that. I keep intending to mix and match parts to turn one of them into a Retro Gaming System. I have a couple of the higher end P4s that have HyperThreading, 2 gigs of DDR 3200, and an ATI 9600XT that would work quite nicely for that. Just need to find the time to do it.

[@gionder]

I used to use a flathead screwdriver to snap loose the plastic hooks from the cooler

[@jedifox8422]

My Dell Dimension 8300 w/ P4 3.2ghz ran great for 5 years. Still one of my favorites. 😊

[@jcfb1470]

For what it's worth I think these P4 machines make for a nice Windows 98se/Me retro gaming machine if you pair them with something like a Geforce4 Ti and a Soundblaster live.

[@e8root]

True but actually Geforce FX would be even better (not GF6 though as it lacks 16-bit dithering making some older games ugly as hell... for the same reason Radeons 9500+ might not be good idea, though they did have dithering which worked at long as AA was used... at least personally I'd go with GF FX 59xx) and Audigy 2ZS or even 2ZS Pro / 4 Pro. Also there exist motherboards for Core 2 with Win98 compatibility and those might be even better... or maybe not because Win98/ME does get unstable when CPU is too fast so fast P4 might be the best actually./

[@kuthevyr]

Funny enough, my Pentium 4 is the late one so it does have SATA and I've been using it with IDE HDD for years, the same WD800 80 gig, then when I was rebuilding the system as I was getting into retro gaming, I got an old 80 gig SATA HDD which end up being SATA variant of WD800. I still have that IDE WD800 and that thing worked for over a decade and it's still alive, it's a great HDD. And about the cooler, you have to hold both tabs tight and then lift it to one side, just like while installing but in reverse

[@ragdolltech3526]

I am actually watching this on a pentium 4!! I took one a few years back and made a dedicated build for watching KZbin on my crt tv! It's upgraded to high heck but it's a pentium 4!

[@e8root]

Yes, P4 should be able to play YT as long as GPU does all the decoding and web browser is GPU accelerated. Nice exercise but kinda pointless :)

[@312diag]

@@e8root this is why its hard to even give away a P4 system...(to a non-geek) unless, like you said, it has a GPU to play YT

[@talvisota327]

can it play anything higher than 480p smoothly?

[@SMlFFY85]

At what point does the "retro community" deem something retro? The oldest Pentium 4s are nearly 21 years old, so was a chip from 1979 not retro yet in 2000? It all seems pretty arbitrary to me.

[@StephenHoldaway]

I'd argue that it's more about the ability to access things that you can't run easily on modern hardware or operating systems, than the specific age of the hardware. A lot of games from the early 2000s won't run under Windows 10, though some are still accessible thanks to patches by GoG and virtualization. Things like 16-bit windows executables are definitely out of reach now though, afaik (eg. Sim Farm). I was using a P4 with Win 98 and later Win XP in my highschool years, so to me I don't think it'll ever be retro - it's just a slower, less power efficient way to do things you can still do on modern machines

[@njsynthesis]

@@StephenHoldaway Very well said. I’ve come to this conclusion myself over the past few months. The last revolutions in the consumer PC space were PCI-E and SATA. These machines have both 2+ decades peripheral forwards compatibility and a decade backwards with processing power to boot. I don’t think P4 machines will ever truly be obsolete as long as quality FOSS software continues to exist.

[@talvisota327]

i would say anything before core 2 or athlon 64 is retro nowadays. 32 bit only and too slow for basically all modern applications. sure you can still browse the web or do office tasks on a socket 478 pentium 4 or even older stuff if you have enough patience, but does it make sense?

[@kidstar64]

Take a volt meter and check between ground and the +5VSB (purple wire) and check its not over voltage. Working from my memory fixing PCs back in the day, there was problems with some Antec PSUs. I normally saw the issues with PSUs that were included with the Antec cases but that label looks similar to what I remember. I remember seeing voltages in the 7-9 volt range. Not sure if its related at all but perhaps its something to check especially with the squealing the PSU was making. And yes, the P4 coolers were always a pain to get off. And often it would rip the CPU out of the socket.

[@icedkiller686]

Open that Antec PSU and check those notorious Caps in it!

[@send2sergei]

Hi RetroSpector78, you seem really knowledgeble about these P4 Intel Motherboards. I built a new-old Intel Pentium 4 Windows 98SE gaming computer and have trouble finding some of the older Intel Chipset Drivers. Do you by chance happen to have the original Windows 98SE drivers for the Intel D875PBZ. I can't seem to find the drivers anywhere as Intel has stopped supporting all old drivers for old hardware. Please, let me know if you have the drivers or know where I can find them. Thanks!

[@harryshuman9637]

Those pins are from hell, I swear. I broke JTAG pin on one of my low-end P4's. Why the hell is there a JTAG pin on a bloody P4 processor?

[@owenmorgan857]

I have had so many machines with this issue, and why many mb's like gigabyte etc when dual bios. Restoring the bios is always such a pain

[@matthewjbauer1990]

I remember getting a Dell motherboard + P4 from a friend in High School in a trade. I traded Magnesium fire starter blocks for it. That was 2006 or 2007. I think this system replaced an eMachines (Gateway) Sempron system. The Sempron was lousy and the P4 wasn't much better. That said, at least I could do stuff on the P4 whereas the Sempron couldn't even type documents without causing issues. I remember installing the MSDNAA prerelease version of Vista on that P4 and I think that was a mistake. The system didn't last too long before I replaced it with the original C2D Mac Mini (I still have) and a white Macbook C2D for college.

[@bloeckmoep]

Trust me, your friend got the better end of the deal, he got tools to make fire where as you got the FIRE.

[@MasticinaAkicta]

Ah yes the early P4's had only 256kbyte of cache. Which KILLED performance. P4's REQUIRED a lot of cache. Worse were the Celerons with even less cache. Sure it had the Ghz but... not the performance.

[@bloeckmoep]

@Jessica💋 Sweety Hotgirl - Vlogs : THAT! Everyone that I know had a P4 said exactly the f.ing same. A school colleague of mine had a chilligreen P4 2.8ghz machine with a radeon mobility 9500... this thing after half an hour ut2k3 or 2k4 was practically a stove. I swear you could have boiled eggs or a pot with potatoes on that thermonuclear notebook.

[@virtualtools_3021]

@@MasticinaAkicta makes me wonder how fast the Tulsa NerBurst xeons like 7410m with 16MB L3 perform

[@lg2k5]

I had a similar problem in a P3 system loooong time ago. Had to make a boot disk with an autoexec.bat and the bios flash utility with some parameters in the .bat, and it works.

[@PiotrK2022]

@RetroSpector78 Cause you should not pull the cooller up.. Good practise is to heat the cooler up using hair dryier, undo clips, then move the cooler side to side first and when becomes loose then pull it up. I took off P4 collers many, many, many, many times and never pulled out the CPU out.

[@Bewefau]

I have a question..... if a factory can put the pins on.... why can't we fix them after they break?

[@bamdadkhan]

it's not just you, i fucking hate those plastic clips as well. some intel stock coolers still come with similar ones - a really cheap move on the part of intel.

[@nickwallette6201]

Info on the Intel website?? What, they still acknowledge this board exists? I thought Intel switched to a Marie Kondo method of archival.

[@jysnmat]

i used to have a Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop that i bought with a Ati 9700 mobility graphics and P4 2.4Ghz. I completely upgraded the laptop to make it run as hot as possible by changing the Ati 9700 to 9800 pro and the P4 2.4 to the P4 3ghz. The laptop fans were loud as hell, but my friends would come over to play on it and love the hell out of it for many years since it was faster and had greater graphics than what they had at the time. It was heavy as hell but i would take it to LAN parties all the time to play games. It was my spare gaming computer for when my friends came over as i had a regular desktop that was better but the laptop was still used a lot even after it became a little to weak for a lot of the newer games.

[@Hakan89]

Tapped the notification so fast when i saw who uploaded ❤️

[@mrvellu]

socket 478 plastic mounting bracket is a time bomb 😞I'm just waiting for it to fail and drop that massive heatsink and damage something

[@andrefixa]

Hi, where i can find a free version of 3Dmark 99?

[@colescrustycars]

I have a functioning Dell Dimension 4600 with a Pentium 4. It's been trouble free since new. It still has a copy of microstation dad installed back in the day. I really have no use for it but I cant bring myself to scrap it. I've been thinking about putting a decent graphics card in it and keeping it for XP era games. I wonder if I can successfully install 98SE on it. I'm pretty sure the chipset supports it.

[@volf3r505]

@RetroSpector78 - SATA was a thing for Pentium 4s. SATA is available since 2004. Later Socket 478 and all of the Socket 775 line have SATA ports

[@tradito]

7:11 no thermal paste?

[@RetroSpector78]

Part 2 coming up :) wanted to diagnose first and make sure I would be able to bring the board + cpu back to life

[@guirolain2319]

Recuerdo muy bien ese periodo de los pentiun 4 con socket 478, en su mayoria eran muy muy calientes y de menor rendimiento que los AMD de la competencia en ese tiempo. Tuve un Prescott de 3.2GHz bus de 800MHz y 1MB de cache L2 y literalmente podeis freir (cocinar) un huevo en el disipador, que de paso esos disipadores en los equipos IBM o Dell eran enormes.

[@Chriva]

Pentium 4 was decent at the time. Its main competition was the K7 Tho It did overstay its welcome once K8 nuked the whole playing field. All of a sudden, not even the almighty g5 could compete in terms of IPC. The real joke was Pentium D. :)

[@Chriva]

@Savanna- 𝙾𝚙𝚎𝚗 𝙼𝚢 𝙿𝚛𝚘 Compared to what? K7 was just as bad and p3 didn't stand a chance once they ramped the clocks. Yet again, one can't compare modern tech to what was available at that time :)

[@JenniferinIllinois]

Saw that broken pin and thought it was all over! Glad the CPU still works and hoping you can get the rest of the system up and working.

[@michaeljones6256]

I was hoping you could do a video if this type of machine could be used for a true dos install as machines of this class are very affordable. Also if you can see if the integrated video versions can be used with dos.

[@e8root]

Best DOS machine is with Pentium 3 (or Tualating Celerons) and 440BX chipset with ISA slot. Some Pentium 4 motherboards, especially early ones were also fine because they did support DMA audio interrupts for PCI sound cards which emulated Sound Blaster. This might not be common knowledge but newer systems and also a lot of AMD systems of the time did not support Sound Blaster compatibility at all. I personally am aiming at building Tualating 440BX retro system. Had one with 440LX and Pentium 2 but I want Tualatin :)

[@TunsaMcHaggis]

I skipped P4 , I went from a PIII to a Pentium Dual Core, which was based on the Pentium M core, which was a much better experience than a P4

[@RetroSpector78]

Also have no experience with them. When I started collecting there were so many (cheap) pentium 4 computers on the market. But was focussed more on < pentium3 machines.

[@growtopiajaw]

I had the same 2.4Ghz Northwood Pentium 4 as in the video. Linux performancr on the Pentium 4 was ridiculous. CPU usage jumped to 100% just by moving a cursor. Even with a freshly applied thermal paste, I managed to pull the CPU out of its socket with the CPU stuck to the heatsink. Also managed to bend some pins on the CPU when lifting the CPU off of the heatsink. Great experience overall -_-

[@OneCosmic749]

I played with a Pentium 4 2.8GHz Northwood overclocked to 3.3GHz on some Asus i865 chipset mobo but i expected more performance out of it when compared with a n Athlon XP Barton system at 2.3GHz(Sempron 3000+ OCed 512KB L2 cache). In games it felt like the Athlon system is still faster even though Pentium 4 has much higher memory throughput.

[@6581punk]

Rambus was worse for latency right?

[@Pasi123]

@@6581punk Those newer Pentium 4's don't use RDRAM

[@arthurmann578]

Nice video! I definitely would like to know how you fixed the BIOS and got it running again so I will be looking forward to part 2. 👍👍

[@RetroSpector78]

Going on holiday for a week on monday but will to finish the editing this weekend.

[@arthurmann578]

@@RetroSpector78 👍👍

[@stuartcastle2814]

The first P4s are nearly 21 years old. If they aren't retro, I don't know what is. Hell, a few months back, LGR (Lazy Game Reviews) build what would have been his Dream PC in 2004. It had the same model of Soundblaster X-Fi sound card that I had just removed from my main PC.. Admittedly, the PC specs at that time bore little resemblance to the specs it had in 2004, but since 1994, I've not bought a whole PC at once, preferring to upgrade my PC bit by bit, replacing bits as they became outdated. I'd not bothered with the sound card because, TBH, sound cards haven't improved massively since 2004. They were capable of multi channel CD quality sound then, and they are now. The only reason I replaced the X-Fi recently is that I upgraded to a Ryzen 5 3600X (previously been an Intel fanboi), and the new MB has no PCI slots. I've switched to onboard sound because, for my needs, a separate sound card would offer no advantage to onboard, and would cost more. Can't remember if my main PC ever had a P4, I've got a feeling that went straight from a P3 to an Athlon XP, then a Core 2, but I had a P4 based Sony Vaio, which, TBH, ultimately turned out to be one of the worst computers I have ever dealt with. In theory, it was more than powerful enough for my needs, it never felt that fast. Certainly not fast enough for anything more than basic web browsing, email and MS Office usage.

[@stuartcastle2814]

@Phoenix 𝙾𝚙𝚎𝚗 𝙼𝚢 PROFILE I'm not knocking the P4 at all. While my own experience with a Sony Viao P4 wasn't great, we used a lot of them at work, and they ran well, which leads me to believe my Viao was just a crap laptop.

[@MarkFrischknecht6502]

I run a P4 in the winter months... makes a good space heater.

[@e8root]

Not really. Core i9 is much much better for that purpose :D

[@Paar86]

I think this would apply to Prescott, Northwood are OK. I actually quite like them.

[@e8root]

@@Paar86 One Pentium 4 is nothing. Two Prescotts aka Pentium D 8xx overclocked to 4GHz were more like it

[@RoyHess666]

2:17 I was about to say... some pins you can actually remove without hurting the CPU much

[@dykodesigns]

I have 2 pentium 4 systems, I like them for running windows XP era software. Why I find odd in the presentation with the specs is that they list the platform as “64 bit”. I don’t recall pentium 4 being a 64 architecture. Shouldn’t that be 32 bit? Whoever created that spec sheet at Intel must have gotten that wrong or it wasn’t proofread. Very curious…..

[@mustangrt8866]

32 only

[@armanelgtron4533]

There are some 64-bit Pentium 4 CPUs - especially on Socket 775

[@mustangrt8866]

@@armanelgtron4533 this is a Socket478

[@virtualtools_3021]

@@mustangrt8866 there were a couple of 64bit 478 Pentium 4s, special order by IBM

[@mustangrt8866]

there is one listed on ebay

[@waterslidexplorer]

Hi sir, purple 3300uF 6.3V Capacitors on this motherboard are known to fail. I see your motherboard has them. You may want to take a look at them.

[@RetroSpector78]

I did. Turned out fine. Problem was with the bios. Documentation on how you update the bios on this board didn’t help, or the bootloader that looks up the bios file on a floppy was also corrupted. But did manage to do it in the end. Stay tuned for part 2

[@donixion4368]

I have 2 socket 775 Prescott P4 3Ghz HTs Running 2 Gb of DDR2. I still use them for older games. I never had a problem with the Pentium 4 for anything I did with it.

[@BackroomsSlayer]

I had a P4 cpu in an old compaq that ignited in a huge single bright orange flame inside a pc I had about 9 years ago, looked like a torch flame sounded like a burning flare lasted for ten seconds then the machine died.

[@PiotrK2022]

@ RetroSpector78 Wrong! 865PE chipset had SATAI interface. I still have on stock a Pentium 4 mobo with SATA I support...

[@RetroSpector78]

This was the 845PE / 845GE chipset with IDE support. 865 came later.

[@PiotrK2022]

@@RetroSpector78 Correct, I had 845 too but I killed it by mistake - oh well. :(

[@asanjuas]

Ohh the bios that's a shame something happens to me in the past to visualize what i am doing i needed a pci video card to show what's happening , but solve my issues or shorting to pins of the bios i don't remember what pins exactly but ... that's a shame :(

[@RetroSpector78]

It wasn’t the video card. Bios was corrupted and the fact that you have zero video output made it very difficult to debug. But managed to fix it. Stay tuned for part 2

[@asanjuas]

@@RetroSpector78 i speak very bad i think my english is not so good i am referring to a computer bios , but a pci video card is needed on those cases to display something on the screen on this computers in the case of older pentium there's no agp and only pci and need an isa video card to display what's happening.

[@Moi_Gospodin1337]

I had Pentium 3 550MHz till 2003, i guess. When know DooM 3 will need at least 1.5GHz CPU I ask parents for upgrade, and receive Celeron 2.1GHz +128Mb RAM +GeForce3 ti200, I was happy, but was more happy when sold 128Mb module and replace it with 512Mb

[@e8root]

Celeron 2.1 was not good Doom 3 CPU. I know because I had Celeron 2.2 and it ran like wet dog :)

[@Moi_Gospodin1337]

@@e8root well yeah, but I was happy to walkthrough the game in 25-30 fps, also with effects that geForce 3 ti200 can show :D

[@argoneum]

Seems that capacitor for 5VSB (5B stand-by) in the PSU is dried, either replace the PSU or replace the capacitor. There used to be place for two of them, but for the cost reduction some manufacturers installed only one, and -- when it dried -- 5VSB was gone, or worse, not quite 5V any more. Also, nice monitor, I use one of these myself :)

[@fishy166]

my first P4 experience wasn't a good one either, it was 2011 and I had bought an hp dc5000 sff from someone off of craigslist. I had to get my own pc because we couldn't share the athlon X2 Compaq anymore. However I learned so much and I'm happy I made the decision

[@FugginNugget]

I have one of these Intel boards in my collection, a model up form this that has SATA. NOTHING but stability issues, no matter the OS I put on it.

[@RetroSpector78]

Also have had a couple of crashes. But did a memtest and noticed some failures. So hoping a memory swap will fix it.

[@FugginNugget]

@@RetroSpector78 I've tried that too, using slower and faster types of RAM as well. I eventually gave up on the machine. It's currently sitting in storage slowly getting cannibalized for parts.

[@MagnumForce51]

Yeah that noise from the PSU was likely the over current protection being tripped. I think the older PSUs would do that if something was shorting one of the power rails. Could also be something failing inside the PSU that could do that. Although usually you have to unplug the PSU to reset it so it wouldn't have powered up at all if that was the case. Either way that PSU definitely doesn't sound healthy.

[@AveragePootis]

Where are you from? You speak in an american accent but you said "did took" which i have not heard from an american before. This might be correct, in which case im an ass, which would not surprise me

[@exaltedb]

I’d definitely consider the Pentium 4 retro these days. Sure it was a black spot on Intel’s history but it sure was a fascinating one

[@Shmbler]

P4 is such an interesting platform with quite some evolution over the years. All the way from Rambus over SDRAM to DDR, or from Wilamette to HyperThreading Northwood. I'm really looking forward to the next part!

[@e8root]

There was also Prescott. Some of them were even 64-bit. I am not sure if you can run newest Win10 64-bit but definitely Win7 64-bit can run on P4 and since these CPU's had SSE3 they are still supported in many modern software unlike many of Athlons and Athlons 64. Also at one time, particularly Pentium D (it was not P4 but pretty much also were, just two of them at once) was giving better dual core experience than Athlon X2. Slower and much more power inefficient but Pentium D just worked. Just like Core 2 Duo just worked, no issues with having two cores at all.

[@Shmbler]

​@@e8root Back in the day I had a Northwood with HyperThreading and was very, very happy with it for a couple of years. I still have to get my hands on a 478 Prescott though. It should be interesting to explore for the reasons you've mentioned. In my opinion, "Pentium 4" actually means an exceptionally wide range of possible performance and features. I think it is comparable to the whole socket A line of CPUs.

[@DosGamerMan]

I have a ps/2 that won't read it's bios from the floppy drive. New battery. New drive. Chanting my Shakra. Nothing has worked.

[@leroydupuis9648]

Pentium 4 was my first processor, winxp was my last os I used from windows.

[@TechTimeWithEric]

I think I skipped Pentium 4 too. I think I went from Pentium 3 to an AMD 64 3200, then to C2Q

[@RetroSpector78]

I went from an Athlon XP to a core i5 750. Have a huge gap where I didn’t really care / used PCs. Was starting my software development career and computers / laptops became a simple tool to get work done.

[@TechTimeWithEric]

@@RetroSpector78Sounds like me with trucks/Utes, I'm big into trucks/utes. I have 7 Square Body Chevy trucks/utes and a few S10s. I don't know how prevalent those are in your country though. But I'm big into 70s and 80s trucks. To me newer trucks are just a tool, like my 2018 Silverado, it's literally just a tool for me. If I want to enjoy driving, I will hop into either my 77 with the big 454 V8 and a 4 speed manual, or my little S10 with a big V8 and a 6 speed manual lol.

[@carlwillows]

I skipped the p4 altogether. Went from a p3 to an Athlon 64 to the core2. P4's had a terrible reputation.

[@retrocompaq5212]

asus p4pex with p4 2400mhz was the best setup i had back in the days, it was 200 times better than my athlon tbird, i had issues over issues with my amd, my pc even caught on fire, amd was even worst 20 years ago

[@plasmar1]

I consider 478 as retro...... 775 depends on the model; I kinda think the version of P4 plays a big role on if people liked them or not and how they feel about them in general; for myself I didn't like them cause of the northwood but prescott was ok; northwood is kinda Athlon XP era(consider retro), Prescott and onwards is like Athlon 64 first gen era(not there yet)

[@timewave02012]

One of the things I remember Pentium 4 doing that proved to be a mistake for Intel was making the pipeline significantly longer in anticipation of higher clock speeds. Meanwhile, AMD was developing 64 bit extensions that were so successful Intel had to implement them for their CPUs, and it's the instruction set we're still using ~20 years later (with SIMD improvements, crypto, and virtualization extensions).

[@dennisp.2147]

The Northwood P4's were a pretty good improvement over Willamette P4's. They were decent little performers. Particularly if you could get one second-hand rather than paying for one new. Otherwise, if you were buying new, you were better off cost and performance wise with the AMD offerings.

[@Captain_Char]

psu has bad caps, ive seen it happen on sff pcs mostly, the psu noise on sff dells will cause them not to boot, its bad caps I believe

[@TheRetroCave]

I have a Pentium 4 1.5GHz with a Voodoo 5 5500PCI on Windows ME that I just used to make a comparison Video between Quake 1996 and Quake 2021 on a modern RTX3070 PC. It's beige and I dare say that I consider that total Retro then :)

[@RetroSpector78]

In this one’s defense : it has some beige parts. Identity crisis :)

[@canespastico]

I had a Pentium D, which it was basically 2xP4 strapped together, and I ran it in my rig from 2006 to 2016 using XP, Win 7 and Ubuntu, it's still going strong in an HP dc7600 SFF I'm using as a media center, my gf used it also for a period of time and she did very light tasks with it. These CPUs just refuse to die, if your expectations are low they still deliver and they might surprise you. Fuck planned obsolescence!

[@nashcomp]

While intel release i3,i5,i7 and i9 cpus, there is no i4 why? Because the pentium 4 is too powerfull that cant be replaced by any intel cpus again.

[@RuruFIN]

Those Smartpower PSUs were bad even new. Wouldn't be surprised if it broke something.

[@Aimede]

It remembers me my cousin's P4 that got all the possible plagued elements of the era : sluggish 1.4 ghz, shitty rambus and winMe

[@e8root]

WinME gets bad reputation but then comes retro computer and on WinME you can plug usb stick and it just works (if its FAT32 formatter of course) and Win98 not so much ;) But yeah, I didn't use WinME either because it lacked DOS and was even less stable than Win98 if that was even possible.

[@Mico605]

My first ever PC had a single core Celeron on 478 socket. I remember when i got my first paycheck, i instantly ordered a Pentium 4 the fastest i could find. It felt like night and day compared to my Celeron.

[@anthonyclarke2261]

takes me back... the 2.4c was a beast to overclock!

[@BlackDragon-xn2ww]

I did something with my son athlon m only ground the post by the videocard it ran faster and got hotter could heat half the house with it while it was only 1.6gig cpu it ran good mine was a pent 4 and was ok but it never did all that well

[@Caleb-fv5fp]

If it’s 15+ years old it’s retro, 20+ is vintage, a quarter century is antique and 30+ is classic and 40+ is ancient. The Atari 2600 (console) and the commodore pet (pc) are both 46 years old, that’s crazy!

[@O.Shawabkeh]

There are new Intel 865 boards available on US eBay, for around $110.

[@aaroncheah2088]

Same. Bought an old Lenovo Pentium 4 desktop and been trying to install W98 on it. No luck. Installation will always BSOD. Tried many CDs and ISO images. If XP, no problems. So, definitely not hardware related.

[@retrocompaq5212]

weird, i have 3 bootable partitions on mine, win3.11, win me and winxp no issues, had w98se before me, found that me was more stable and i have my dos 6.22/w3.11 partition for dos games

[@RetroSpector78]

Also installed win98se on this one when it was still booting :) didn’t experience much issues but didn’t do a lot with it as it almost immediately bricked after installing XP.

[@The-Cubis]

When is the live stream comming?

[@RetroSpector78]

I have a week off now and spending a week with family. But I’ll announce something soon.

[@The-Cubis]

@@RetroSpector78 okay that semms nice

[@jorgeledesma3590]

tengo un p4 2.53 con 2gb de ram corriendo con windows 7 y navegando por internet.tuve un cybercafe durante 16 años y era mi server para manejo de las estaciones, estuvo prenduido durante 5 años 16 horas al dia. al dia de hoy anda perfectamente esta montado sobre una placa asrock p4i65g con una placa de video geforce 6200 de 512 me resta ponerl eun ssd de 120 para el sistema operativo nada mas gran pero gran maquina!!!

[@anomaly95]

If you think the Northwood P4's were hot and power hungry, wait until you get a Prescott! :p They were nicknamed "Pres_hots_". Even with a die shrink from the Northwood, they ran at about 100W or more.

[@dodolurker]

I had a P4... a 2,6GHz Northwood. Have lots of fond gaming memories using it 😊. I seem to remember that Northwood was pretty OK compared to AMD's similar offerings... but Willamette and Prescott were kinda dire 😃. Willamette performed like crap and Prescott was like an oven.

[@Inlanning]

I still have a Pentium4 running since 2004.

[@pvc988]

I had a 2GHz Celeron of this era back in the day. I wasn't very impressed by it, to say at least. Cooler coming out with the CPU and bending pins in the process was classic problem with 478 socket machines. Happened to me few times as well.

[@naikjoy]

Isn't it that people went for 486, Pentium II, Pentium 4, E8400, i7 4790k and now Idk i7-10700k. But I think the Pentium 4 was one crazy powerful processor at a important time of gaming. Half Life 2, Far Cry, COD2, NFSU2, Max Payne 2, F.E.A.R, Doom 3, Chronicles of Riddick, GTA SA. Played all of those games with a Pentium 4 2.8 ghz Northwood and the ATi Radeon 9600 Pro.

[@sandy0078888]

P4 is a pretty good machine. Good for school and office, more memory often does the trick. Today we go for parallel compute and emulation, hence need more power. 1.5 decade back, my friend used to run counter-strike, nfs with 256mem, and cpu usage of 80-95%, lol.

[@daryllarsen8858]

I know that case! I built many generic office computers in the early 2000's using that case. It came in all beige too. :-)

[@IBM_Museum]

@2:14 - Hehe, it will probably make it run a degree cooler! The bonding that manufacturers do between the P4 and heatsink definitely sucks (I've lost a system the same way).

[@Megatog615]

19:00 ah, i was wondering if you had a Post Card

[@qbertguy]

while the Pentium 4 was always hot, the later ones with hyperthreading were actually pretty nice to use. Prior to that I had Athlon XP systems

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Somebody gave me a Dell Optiplex "mini PC" with a 32-bit Pentium 4 CPU in it. I upgraded the BIOS, stuck in a 64-bit HT Pentium 4 CPU in it and put the maximum 3GB RAM in it. As I run (Gentoo) Linux by default, it makes a reasonable machine for lite browsing and general office stuff.

[@virtualtools_3021]

And the 2nd latest Pentium EEEE 990FX can be a real treat to use

[@Jkauppa]

on another note, if processor would be cd sized, they could be made from lowed grade silicon, processes, easier to make

[@Jkauppa]

same area for same sized gates means more area per gate

[@Jkauppa]

if processors are made like solar panels, it would be really easy to make

[@Jkauppa]

processor panel, lol, self-cooling, self-powered, by solar

[@Jkauppa]

no clean room really needed 100x scale, 1um scale, compared to 10nm

[@Jkauppa]

its like wall/floor tiles making the solar panel tiles

[@Davedefeat.]

Woohoo! New episode!