The Last of the Netburst Lineage: Pentium 4 661

[@Mother_Mercury]

I have had the pentium 4 631 from the same series for 5 years. (3ghz stock, 3,8ghz overklock with stock cooler) Great CPU that ran Windows Vista fine with 4GB of RAM, later Windows 7 and I eventually replaced it in 2011 with a Core2Quad Q6600 that I also had for 5 years. (With the tape mod to increase the multiplier) All this on an Asus P5K motherboard which was also fantastic. Good old times 😀

[@joshreiman]

Really glad I held onto my 661 all these years, they are getting hard to find. Excellent video again Phil - I should dig mine out of storage and play around with it now that winter is coming in North America I could use a machine to heat my office ;)

I used to have a P4 3.8 GHz Prescott system back in the day and it was an oven! Especially since I live in Brazil, so the weather does not help in my part of the country. Back in those days, air conditioning was only for the richest families, so I had an open window and a fan running for many hours of the day. I ended up changing the case (the new one featured two very large intake fans) and buying an aftermarket cooler (a Zalman copper cooler than kind of looked like a flower). I still loved that system, though. So much so that the new case had an acrylic window, blue LED in the fans, colt cathode lights (also blue), and IDE cables that were round to maximize airflow. If memory serves, I used to have a XFX Geforce 6800 GT. It did not work properly and gave me lots of artifacting. So I returned it and got a Radeon X1650 instead. Back then I played a lot of Company of Heroes, UT2004, NFS Carbon, and some other stuff. Phil's point about nostalgia is spot on. A Core 2 Duo makes more sense from all sorts of different perspectives, but maybe it does not make us feel the same way because it is a different piece of hardware compared to the one we used to have back in the day. Sometimes feelings will come before practicality! Nowadays I have a Pentium 4 2.0 GHz Northwood. I run Windows XP on it and a bunch of classic games I got from GOG. Most are from the Win 95-98 era, like Interstate 76-82, Moto Racer, Giants Citizen Kabuto, Total Annihilation, and stuff like that. Great little system with a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 and a Samsung 17" monitor. I'm looking for a new videocard, though. That Geforce MX 4000 is just bad. It's hard to find a working Direct X 9.0c card around here...

[@poblamkbr]

Muito bom achar um BR assistindo o Phil kkkkkkkkkkkk

@@poblamkbr Tamo junto! Kkkkkkkkk

[@eletro_doc9529]

I enjoy when you start talking about hardware and at the end of the videos we get free games reviews.

[@fft2020]

It is always a delight to watch you videos! I am also a retro enthusiast and I absolutely love your channel. I learn so much and have so much fun ! Thank you so much. You are a wonderful person !

[@philscomputerlab]

Awesome! Thank you!

[@bartekj.5311]

Poland loves you back Phil!!! ❤❤❤

[@pawe3839]

Greetings from Poland :) When P4 was intel top product I was on AMD platform : Duron/Athlon XP (Socket 462) and later A64 Venice (socket 939) but since Core 2 Duo era i moved to Intel platform (I had Pentium Dual Core E2140@.3,2 - 100% O/C and @6600@3.6, after that it was time to shine for my precious 3770K@4.7 for 11 years and now I am I5 12400F user)

[@7MBoosted]

I agree, I have slowly been building my GoG library, so I do not have to rely on Steam support for an offline retro machine.

[@RuruFIN]

Gotta love that you basically gave a review of Far Cry :D I also love that and in fact I replayed it not that long time ago. And as you mentioned that it is fine with widescreen, I played at 4K and no complains :)

[@AliceC993]

It's baffling to me that Intel was so insistent on making NetBurst work for so long. You'd think that the initial failure with Willamette would have raised some red flags, especially when Northwood didn't fix it.

[@mariastevens6406]

Is it, though? I mean, look at skylake, and Nvidia's G98 or whatever the 8800gtx was

[@xBruceLee88x]

@@mariastevens6406 story goes that they started developing what became known as the p4 and p3 at about the same time. P3 finished first and they needed something to market as p4 was delayed. At the time they couldn't push clocks high on the p3. Many modern cpus can be traced back to the p3. P4 was "easy" to brute force performance out of by adding more clock, cache, and extended pipeline. P3 tech was carried over to the pentium mobile line that was in use at the same time desktops were still running netburst. I want to say they went back to the p4 tech when developing atom to some extent. 20+ years of cpus based on the two technologies can be hard to keep up with the finer detail from my personal memory anyway You could say p4 was meant to be p3, but it was easier to get to a higher clock at first to brute force performance past what became p3. Look at IPC of P3 vs first P4

[@strelatronics5533]

​@@mariastevens6406The 8800/9800 series were actually good, and there was no real competition, so nVidia milked it

[@bzuidgeest]

You underestimate the investment and momentum. Turning a massive company around like that, especially if you have a few egos to bruise, is a massive effort.

[@dave7244]

One thing the Pentium 4 did a lot better than the Athlon XPs was any Video Encoding. It was miles faster to encode on a Pentium 4.

[@diegosnake6942]

great video Phill Pentium 4 its a legendary cpu. one of my favorite retro pc´s🖥🖱

[@benjaminwirth5192]

Last years winter i played with a pentium 4 640 with ati radeon 2600pro agp. That was very nice too. For this years winter i decided to go with a core2 duo 8500 with a ati radeon 4850. Nice video again, phil.

[@flightsimdeskuk]

I missed out on the P4. I had an Athlon XP 2500+ overclocked to be Athlon XP 3200+ back in the day. Then I switched to gaming laptops for the next few years. They had Pentium M, Core 2 Duo and then an Intel i7. I only went back to desktops 4 years ago and went with AMD Ryzen 3800X, which I have since upgraded to 5800X3D. Your channel has encouraged me to get into retro PCs so I now own 5 or 6 P4 motherboard/CPUs. I haven't built a PC with them yet though. My Overkill Win98 PC has a Core 2 Duo X6800 + Geforce 4600, and my XP overkill PC has a 3rd gen i5 + GTX 750 Ti.

[@Reziac]

I had a P4 3GHz engineering sample, and later one with hyperthreading, used on the same board. 100% stable and never any trouble at all. Used as my main PC for about ten years.

[@rodhester2166]

Thanks for the great video.. always fun to play games of the past, such great memories.

[@AaronHendu]

I got one of the first P4 with HT, and I loved the dang thing and didn't even overclock it as it was in a shuttle style PC. I previously had a 478 Celeron, and a 754 Sempron, so I obviously thought the P4 was amazing.

[@raven4k998]

180 nm down to 65 that's huge intel never does that kind of shinkage to there cpu's anymore like that one

[@another3997]

​@@raven4k998Nobody shrinks their CPU die that much any more, because they can't. The smaller the die, the harder and more expensive it gets. It's amazing how quickly the industry has got down to 5nm and kept chip yields so high. There were certainly several plateau along the way where it looked like the end of the road.

[@angelpc22]

The Cedar Mill D0 revison was awesome, like pentium D 960 or 945 D0 Presler Low heat good perfomance, "better" power consuption. Maybe the P4 designers would like to reach this level at 2003..instead of late 2005. Very sad Intel not follow this line with 45nm fab. I think they can reach 65W with 2 cpu or 95W With Pentium Quad...anway the modified P3 based Pentium M Dothan 90nm win ->Yonah and Core 2 65nm As i know Intel had plan Penium D970 (3.8GHz) and P4 671 3.8Gz but cancelled

[@angelpc22]

​@@raven4k998 yes P4 423 pin start with 180nm ...when P3 tualatin has 130nm in same time ..anway 90nm Prescott 2M was the 1st step when can say ..it has something performance...Very say the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 not followed the D0 revision and decrease power consuption.

[@borisvokladski5844]

When I played Far Cry for the 1st time, it was the 32 bit edition of the game. When Crytek released the 64 bit patch for the game, my friend had an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ CPU. This was the first real game eye candy I witnessed. It was so beautiful. That was something P4 was missing.

[@SneakiestDuke68]

I'm 24 and my first pc was with WinXP on AthlonXP 1800+ and Geforce 4 4400 ti. Painkiller is nice game. Greetings from Poland :)

[@lucasrem]

Poland, that was the Dresden ARM Fab 1 ! A local CPU ! Cheap and good !

[@Kordanor]

Topic Suggestion: Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro. When I first saw 3D acceleration in action, I had to get one of those 3D cards as well. And it seemed like the Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro was a All in One Card with 3D Acceeration. But then I got disappointed quickly and suspected that the cards was broke, until I realized it's just not great. So I ended up buying a Voodoo 2 Accelerator on top. The Card is probably not very attractive for building a retro PC now, but I think its kinda interesting as it basically "evades" the common eye. Like when I looked first back at it I felt like "so what the hell was that thing even based on?" There is also no coverage of that specific card on yt and only very few videos on the 3Dlabs Permedia 2.

[@E-Box]

The Windows XP/Pentium 4 setup is nostalgic for me because it's what I used for my oldest KZbin uploads on my old channels. (2006, 2007) Of course, the oldest videos that I've made and uploaded with that P4 and actually survived are YTP videos on my YTP channel. Is that something I should be proud of? Probably not, but I'll bring it up anyway. This was also the era that I was in an area that didn't have anything better than dial-up until 2012.

[@xBruceLee88x]

Excellent video. I think I can safely say I've experienced most flavors of consumer intel cpus. Up to 7th gen that I've owned, I've played with newer while building systems for people of course lol. If you can put one together, a fast rambus board and 1.7ghz cpu is surprisingly capable. I actually got windows 7 running on it! 2gb ram. I could go on and on about various systems, so I'll just say my asrock 4coredual vsta 2.0 system was probably the most fun and flexible

[@mesterak]

Happy Friday Phil!

[@philscomputerlab]

First comment 😀

[@Obie327]

Great Retro nostalgia Phil. My first Pentium 4 was the Northwood 3.0ghz with Intel's excellent 800 fsb. I had the ATI 9600XT and 1 gig of ram. My last P4 (still have) is the Emachines P4 641 @3.2ghz with 4 gigs of ddr 2 ram and 550ti from Nvidia. I still have my XFX GTS 8800 320 as well. Using a 32bit Windows 7 OS. I love going back to play my old games and some Pinball with my PS2 keyboard. Pain Killer is an awesome shoot em' up game as well! Cheers!

[@lordwiadro83]

Back then I could not afford a Pentium 4, and I was rocking a Duron. My Duron was a 900 MHz model on a ECS motherboard, with 256 megs of RAM, and combined with a GeForce 2 MX. I used that system until late 2006, then I gave it to my girlfriend (repackaged in a prettier case), and got myself a Sempron 64. Today one of my retro PCs is also a Duron, but 600 MHz. It fits better to a Voodoo 3 card. And has low power consumption for a Socket A CPU.

[@sebastianebert4295]

Nice setup as always! You give us back the nostalgic feeling! All that nice hardware and software, a blast from the past. I had a P4 HT 3200 Prescott on a S478 Asus P4P 800 SE, 1 GB DDR 400 (2x512 MB Kingston), PowerColor ATI 9800 SE 128 MB DDR, soft-modded with Omega drivers, but it said still using 4 ROPs for a reason unknown to me. When I now read forums people back then wrote the PowerColor one was one of those with high change for soft-modding. The result would be somewhat below ATI 9600 Pro or so. At least it was faster than with standard Radeon drivers. Until the mainboard died of overheating, 120 watts idling on desktop, in summer 52 °C desktop, 72 °C CPU temp and even reboots, ouch. RIP 2004-2008. Well, the mainboard died, the CPU still works (ran at 2800 MHz in a BIOS locked Celeron 2800 mainboard), the RAM and still exists, GPU was given to a pal, after having repaired it twice (oiled fan and repaired the voltage regulator at the back). The Intel boxed cooler was a very bad one for such a 89-103 W CPU, I won't even use it for a 65 W CPU nowadays. After the mainboard died I went for power efficient PCs only, used better cooling solutions ofc. and even bought low TDP GPUs since then like ATI 4550 512 MB GDDR3, Nvidia GT 1030 2 GB GDDR5, but they do work quite well. Nowadays on my main Win 10 machine I play old 4:3 games with 1440x1080 using dgVoodoo2 maxing anything out, but not using Phong Shaders, which eat very much resources. The fast memory access is a very nice feature to get free performance. Ofc. there's some widescreen patches for some games, but I don't need those, tbh. I also use MSI Afterburner with Riva Tuner and limit the FPS to 60 mostly, because I don't need like 300 FPS in games like NFS HP2 heating up the machine for nothing. If Riva Tuner won't show the stats no matter which overlay method you try, then Trigonesoft Remote can help using Android, but it needs LAN for that. It uses the same RTSS (Riva Tuner Statistics Server), shows CPU, GPU load and FPS. For Anno 1800 I even like to lock it to 30 FPS, having a more fluid gameplay on a Core2Duo E8400 or i5-3570 using a slow GT 1030 GDDR5 in both systems, because I like low power systems. It hardly runs on that GPU, but at 30 FPS it actually is playable and it's more fluid than with 40-50 FPS and 100 % CPU demand. So there's some room for newer games on old systems. And ofc. lower res than 1920x1080 also is possible. People tested some Steampunk 2077 with 1080p and 900p ish, making a huge difference on medium fast GPUs and old CPUs. Indeed, old games were super sharp and had no crappy HDR/blur effects you can't turn off. NFS HP 2010 version is an example I can't play, because I can't see the road being full of effects and steering also is catastrophic in this game. NFS III, 4, HP original, U1, U2 is what I enjoy to play and it still looks good using dgVoodoo2, 1080p, FSAA, fast memory access, no mip-mapping also is more sharp I think. When seeing you playing Far Cry, the vents remind me of a level in XIII, another great game with cel shading and some stealth parts. I don't have a P4 or AMD XP anymore, but at least C2D E8400 3 GHz and Athlon II x2 260 3.2 GHz, so one generation after P4. A pal still has an Athlon 64, still having the old XP installation on the HDD, but not used in ages. One could make a copy of that HDD with Disk2VHD just to keep it for VMs, because that's a very easy way I discovered when we did copy old laptop's XP to our Linux laptops, continue using good old apps. What's still a mystique for me is Pentium III dual CPU and AMD MP dual CPU machines. We see much MP Xeons nowadays, but the old ones are rare. Ofc. there's also PowerPC G4 dual and G5 dual, but there's way less games for Mac, so I'm only interested in old Mac games with high resolution like Prince of Persia, Wolfpack, Lemmings, Comanche 1 CD, which run on oldest G4 single core CPUs having a similar speed to Pentium III. Very interesting CPUs, but wayyy too less apps and games. Same with Linux. That's why DOS and Windows is the key for most games ofc. My real problem is that space isn't infinite and I can't use all desktop towers at the same time, not even collect anything from 30 years. Otherwise I'd have kept like 40 PCs w/ always avg hardware and often 2nd hand, but still good enough. I miss the 486s at most, tbh. It was one of the 1st systems you saw the most speed differences in no time from 486 SX to 5x86 133, any little upgrade offered a quantum leap of new possibilities. 486 66, 80, 100, Am5x86 133...that were the time. Comanche 1-2 and Doom 1-2, Descent, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, AOP, AOE, AOD... The next big thing was the Pentium III for me as we left out Pentium II, then Pentium 4 3+ GHz ofc. or AMD XP 2800+, then several C2D and Core i. Like since 15 years or so we're kinda stuck with CPU speed (free lunch is over for massive single speed performance boosts each year) or let's say the effective CPU speed using new software is like only 50 % more after 10 years now, benchmark speed +100 % in 10 years only, while GPUs still make like +1000 % in 10 years. The real game changers are GPUs and SSDs nowadays. You can game most AAA titles with 10 y/o avg. CPUs by just using a new GPU, SSD, 8+ GB RAM. Well, I love old and new systems and something in between, making modular Frankenstein builds. I have some questions: 1. Will the lower TDP P4 stepping model be slower or is it just a later optimized version like let's say Xeon S771 80 W instead of C2Q 95 W? 2. Have you tried RMclock? It works with P4 hardware and can save some energy when idling. 3. How to run Far Cry 1.4 tent bug fixed with FCAM 1.999? The 2nd newest GOG release did work with it, the latest release doesn't I ran it with original old 1.4 w/o tent bug fixed and with 2nd newest GOG release and it's just awesome, I'd even say a must-have for Far Cry. I also played Delta Sector total conversion back then, but with the tent bug it was insanely hard. If it's installable now with latest tent bug patch, then it would be awesome again. It's a tiny bit like Crysis in the later levels, having some alien drones to shoot at.

[@philscomputerlab]

Great comment! Yes space is a real issue. I try answering your questions. 1. There shouldn't be a performance difference between steppings, the 65W version of Cedar Mill is simply lower power. 2. Haven't used this tool... 3. AFAIK tent issue is fixed with the latest GOG release, it's mentioned in the change log if I remember correctly...

[@retro4fun358]

My first PC was a Medion PC from Aldi supermarket it has 667MH Pentium 3, 20 GB IDE Drive, 128MB SDR RAm and Nvidia Riva TNT 2. This PC working till today but i have to refuse the PSU and the HDD. I have install Window s98 SE on the 40 GB IDE and Windwos XP on the 80 GB IDE Drive. I plan to benchmark this pc in the future. i was 10 when my parents bought this pc so its a part of my childhood. The second PC was the Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo Ti Pentium 4 Prescott HT 540 (3,2GHZ) 1024MB DDR Ram and 2x 250 GB HDD and radeon X600 Pro card. This PC also works even today. AT the moment i have another mainboard there almost the same but with P4 3,6 GHZ. The Diefference from 3,6GHZ to 3,2 GHZ is noticable in some games but not that much what I have expected. Especially in Tony HAwks Underground1/2 and newer Games the 3,6GHz runs 2-3 fps better in Average. P4 3,6GHZ need more Power and getting hotter.... The other Fujitsu Siemens PC Scenic what my father have found for 1 week at the Recycling center is working i have installed WIndows XP with SP3 Updates (Legacy Update) And i have found Drivers it wasn't that easy becuase of the Network Driver.... P4 Northwood 2,6 GHZ 512MB DDR Ram Onboard graphics from intel 80 GB IDE HDD AGP MAinboard 4x/8x. The other P4 what i have its the P4 1,7GHZ , 512MB DDR, 80 GB IDE HDD with Windows XP for Geforce2/3/4 cards for testung Benchmarking etc. Mainboard also from Fujitsu Siemens

[@peterilling1627]

Brings back old memories Phil got some boards here with socket 478,ddr2 ram and pci express alot of fun mate.

[@ukwan]

When Crysis came out I was about 23 and I'd started to earn some money so I had a Quad Core Q6600 2.4ghz 😮 which for the time was a beast! I had it water cooled. The water cooler leaked and everything was damaged and I never repaired it. This was my last gaming PC as I got divorced soon after and never had the funds to make a "current pc" ever again. I've started building retro PCs now and enjoying these old games again.. Windows 95,98,XP and Vista era.

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you for sharing! It's never too later to relive those times! Now you can build a beautiful Core 2 Quad for cheap and have a blast!

[@CoolTI-Daniel]

Back in the day and on a budget I built myself an AMD AthlonXP 2400 with a Geforce4 ti4200 It ran Farcry so well. My only frustration was when Battlefield2 came out, I was forced to change videocards as the Ti4200 didn't support the required pixel shader. It was frustrating as I saw that my old card was much faster then most of the following FX cards. So I think I changed it for a Radeon 9650 if memory serves me well. Back in the day my friend got a Pentium4 1.7 Wilamette... It had atrocious performance. I later built myself a socket 939 Athlon64 x2 3800 which was amazing. My old Athlon XP was upgraded to a barton 3000+ and I gave it to my friend.

[@mpettengill1981]

I have a Willammet P4 system in my collection that was my primary rig for about 5 years and in the early-mid 00s. Had a 9800 Pro in it for a few of those years and played through Far-Cry and GTA SA and some others with no problems. Sadly that 9800 pro died and I moved on to my next machine - I've never gotten around to replacing that 9800 pro with something equivalent. Some day! Maybe :)

[@Koozwad]

I noticed since quite some time ago, they removed 'Windows XP' from the supported OSes on most GOG game pages. If I filter my library of 425 titles, only 10 support XP now. I wonder why they did that...

[@SleeperJohns]

I had a scrapyard Pentium III for the longest time, my Dad found a system in a dumpster -- he couldn't afford any real PC parts and didn't know where to get them at the time until later down the years. No graphics card, no thermal paste. It was all bare bones. If I had to go back to the Pentium III system for a project, I'd give it the best parts possible with both Windows 98SE and XP in mind. Vista and even 7 was there too as a main operating system for that system, but sooner or later, it crapped out. But with a Pentium 4, I'd prefer to go all out, though I have no nostalgia for it. Same goes for the E8600 Core 2 Duo, since it has the best single core performance -- coupling that with any top tier and stable experimentally supported GPU on real hardware, I'd say you can't get any better than that performance wise. Hopefully the experience with multi-booting Windows 98SE and XP would be a solid one, I've never seen anyone use experimental drivers to get a Nvidia Geforce 8800 working. I may give a crack at it when I do build a overpowered PCI-E based Retro PC.

[@TheTeeroy32]

I still have my Pentium 4 Prescott 3.2Ghz, that was my first gaming rig with a Nvidia GeForce 6600 256Mb, which was later upgraded to a Radeon HD6600 1Gb. I played the Cod games all the way through Modern Warfare 3 on that.

[@CRBarchager]

I remember buying the P4 Northwood-c 1.8Ghz processor and overclocking it o 2.4Ghz out the box getting a 33% overclock on the CPU and RAMBUS ram to run at 533Mhz (up from 400Mhz). It was stable and had it for many years until the Core 5-2500k was released.

[@pro.serwis.gdansk]

Смотрю это со своего восстановленного Omen 15-ax, перепроходя Horizon Zero Down, иду в ногу временем) А на деле мне очень нравится ремонтировать старые ноутбуки. Это доставляет огромное удовольствие. Да, 6 поколение, для меня старый, но, кинули нам под веранду сервиса 462 сокет с процессором Sempron 3300+, просто в свободное время восстановил и очень рад этому, сохранил жизнь старому Athlon-у 3200+ - как видит его плата, очень классно. Люблю восстанавливать технику(

[@suiken3149]

I remember having a P4 PC back in the day. It was a socket 478 with 256MB RAM and 40GB IDE HDD. Though I had no idea what was the exact model

[@dodolurker]

I also had a 2,6GHz Northwood P4 back in the day, the first CPU I bought with my own money. Yes, in retrospect I should have gone AMD, but I was young, stupid and drank too much Intel kool-aid 😀. But yeah, lots of fond memories of that PC, especially after I got a Radeon 9800 Pro to go along with it. And yes, I'm pretty sure the Northwood had hyperthreading. And since I'm now old and nostalgic for the good old days, I built myself a mostly identical PC last year 😃

[@RuruFIN]

Northwood was my favourite P4, though Prescotts and Cedarmills were great overclockers :)

[@floriandilewski8321]

I loved my P4 system so much that I built one of my favorite vintage systems with an ASUS P4P800 Deluxe with a 3.4 GHz Prescott. In real life I haf a 3 GHz Northwood running on that board in 2004. Later I upgraded to a massive overclocked Pentium M using the awesome ASUS CT-479 adapter.

[@Towdeee]

Ha! Greetings from Poland! :D

[@Troppa17]

Cedar Mill will even run Windows 10 64bit but probably a bit tooooo slow for everyday use. The updates will bring the system to an hold. Tested Cinebench R23 actually last month and the 661 made 246 Points with only one 2 GiB stick DDR2 667 MT/s. It is probably faster with more RAM in dual channel but it was just for fun. I played Far Cry a lot as well back in the day. Played it through at least 10 times even in the 64 bit version with the even better textures and the latest 32 bit version with HDR. Unfourtnatly there never was an 64 bit HDR version. Remember trying to patch 1.41 on the 64 bit version but it didn't work. It did patch the game but there were graphic glitches everyway and you couldn't interact with doors and other items anymore. And of course I remember the infamous Dam level. That level took at least 10 tries the first time before I reached the vulcano.

[@406Steven]

I kick myself for all the hardware I've thrown out over the years, anything from old ISA cards, AT motherboards, and pretty much any 486 and Pentium 1 up through my Q6600 machine. Now I'm on a huge retro kick and spending way too much money on ebay. I've still got my socket 478 machine from' 02 but have expanded to a Northwood 3.06 P4, E8400 C2D, and an A64 3800+ machine. Some with period-correct GPUs, others with more modern cards still compatible with XP. You're spot-on about the prices of AGP cards, I'm glad I still had a few and picked up a few others before prices really took off--I can't find any worth buying that are under $80.

[@mattpierce5009]

I totally ignored the P4 when it was on the market, but came to appreciate it for retro gaming a few years back when I started watching this channel. Still have the Prescott I built at the time, it's only an AGP Socket 478 but a bit of overclocking (from 3ghz to 3.4) makes it quite decent. A64 is faster per clock but on average the i845 and i865 boards I've used are more reliable and have fewer driver/BIOS quirks than VIA and SiS stuff of the era.

[@csgosniperelitepro]

I had a pentium 4 back in 2006 till 2010 and played sims 2 & 3 on it for years but someone stole my pc from me and i didnt get back into pc gaming until 4th gen intel. I just recently got a MSI socket 478 board with pcie so looking forward to getting back into windows xp soon, thank you for your videos phil.

[@KomradeMikhail]

The real trick with Socket 478 is finding the rare mobos with ISA slots and Win98 chipset drivers.

[@UpLateGeek]

I had a Prescott 3.8GHz for a short time before I switched to an Athlong 64. It was a hand-me-down from a friend who upgraded to the top EE (which he justified the cost to himself that it was still the "fastest" processor well into the C2D era because they had a lower clock speed 🙄). The Prescott was great for games, but it just ran way too hot. From memory the Althong was a later model 3800+, and the support for dual channel memory made it much faster than the Prescott, despite the lower clock speed.

[@tucK2333]

always and i mean always such a pleasure watching your content.

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you!

[@SuperSinSlayer]

nothing but a Phils video to make my day. cheers

[@kenabi]

was trying to find a 661 for my asus p5vd1-x board and the xp build i'm planning around it, but people seem to want crazy money for them. wound up settling for a 641 for now. the only downside i can come up with for this combo is the lack of ddr2 support on this specific board. but it'll do what i want, so i suppose i'll make do until i can find a better option with both PCIe and agp slots.

[@pselvi]

I still own my prescott P4 PC @ 3.2GHz socket 478 and 2.5Gb ram, it had/has it's issues but now and again i turn it on :)

[@treighpedroche1516]

This channel is truly a gem!

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you 😊

[@aaldrich1982]

Thanks Phil for another video 👍

[@ominence9761]

I have the SL9KD Phil and can't wait to put it in a system. What I desperately also want though is the SL9K7:)

[@r.d.7698]

For real? Is SL9KD a real existing production part? I thought the D0 stepping stops at SL9KE and CM 661 only exists in VRM 05A variant, the SL9KD being paper launch.

[@hblanksjukebox]

Could you upload a photo of it to CPU World? I've been after an SL9KD for the better part of a decade and I haven't seen a single photo anywhere.

[@ominence9761]

@@r.d.7698 I'm scared now! I hope mine isn't broken. The etching certainly says so!!

[@ominence9761]

@@hblanksjukebox Ah, sorry I got too excited and posted it without calling it 661! Hopefully, the moderator team fix it on the actual listing. I'll link it back once online.

[@ominence9761]

@@r.d.7698To compare differences to Phil's thumbnail- it's Intel 06, SL9KD Malay, 800/06, L619A601. So some 06 VRM variant it would seem.

[@MrDwadi84]

Hello from Poland, great content :)

[@martli837]

I know it's not objectively the best CPU of that era, but I'm a sucker for a Pentium 4 for all the reasons you state in this video My family computer in 2003 was a Pentium 4 running Windows XP, and at the time it felt like a massive upgrade from our 800mhz pentium 3 running Windows ME (wamp wah). These days my main windows 98 machine is a P4 and it serves me really well, so no complaints there.

[@TechGamesAU]

I had a 2.53 Ghz P4 back in the day and always thought it was such a strange stock clock speed haha

[@3800S1]

The P4 has the opposite effect of nostalgia for me, they feel like e-waste when I look at one haha. I went from a 370 Celeron 766 OC'd to 863 which I loved, to an Athlon XP 2800 at the same time my friend went with the Prescott 3.2. I also wanted to go the P4 route but couldn't afford it, but when I consulted a few PC shops and even on the day of purchase of the Athlon at the PC hardware swap meet market the sellers said, go for the Athlon. I did and did not regret my decision, and my friend had lots of issues with his P4 and it was quite a bit slower than my system and often overheated to a the point of power off protection. He had to turn off HT to get the temps down and boost gaming performance. We had PCs at high school a few years later with the P4 and I recall they were quite slow too.

[@utubeuser1024]

Hi Phil - @ 0:54 - Prescott was a 90nm process, not 180 ;) Also I had a Celeron Northwood 2.4 SL6XG stepping in mid 2003 on a motherboard that didn't "officially" support overclocking - it had only two FSB settings - 400 or 533 - and that Celeron just happened to work perfectly fine at 3.2GHz (24x133) ;) Started my overclocking journey on that system! However when I wanted to play Halo, I noticed the performance was really low even at 3.2GHz so my best friend brought over his P4 .2.4B (18x133) and we plugged that in - and the performance difference was night and day! That was when I started moving away from Celerons and buying P4/Core2/A64 chips :)

[@tjr4744]

Yes ... I was just about to say exactly that myself lmao

[@philscomputerlab]

Bugger missed that one!

[@ukaszkowalczyk3011]

Greetings from Poland ;)

[@pacolima431]

I am around the same age as Phil and a Pentium 4 with similar specs was the last system I cared enough to build myself and tweak. After that I lost intrest in PC gaming, until a few years ago when I got back to enjoying recreating these systems of old and discovering a lot of games that I missed back then... thanks to Phil and Vogons! So this one went straight through the heart ❤

[@danielberrett2179]

Pentium4 a Far cry from modern performance. Thanks for another Video!

[@MarcosCodas]

I remember Pentium 4 so fondly. A friend had a hyperthreaded P4 Sony Vaio and it was incredible. The performance was nuts and the build quality superb.

[@TheDoorsHK21]

I sold my 661 on Ebay to a buyer in Western Australia about two years ago. Who knows, maybe it's the one in the video!

[@puma0085]

Very interesting video. That you have mentioned Far Cry is a funny thing. I played it recently on my modern-day pc but it felt wrong on so many levels. I have put it now on the list of the games to play on original hardware as soon as I get my second rig. I already have a Win 98 gaming system (a Pentium 3 800mhz with a Voodoo 3 2000 agp) and for my second rig, I want to have a nice Win XP system. I think the pentium 4 661 would be a very good pick for my system. I had a way weaker pentium 4 with 1.6 GHz back for many years until it was replaced with a Pentium 3 930. then and despite the fact I was not the most powerful p4 out there I had lots of fun with them. So getting a really powerful pentium 4 would be really nice to have.

[@penguin5384]

Northwood 3.06HT , Prometeia Mach 1 Phase Change , 4.2 Ghz @ -30° of silliness.

[@middle_pickup]

If you want a pentium 4 or era equivalent, go for it. Hope you can repair motherboards though. Don't forget the capacitor plague.

[@mrmerlin6287]

My school IT lab had hot fire Pentium 4 machines in 2004-2005. I went round and installed a copy of Halo CE onto every hard drive of every PC in the lab and it wasnt long until the whole school knew about it. I do remember playing Halo at school came with the scent of baked dust.

[@robd1365]

This is my favourite era for PC builds, but at the time I was running AMD systems, swapping about with friends I managed to get hold of a Tyan Tiger motherboard with matching Athlon MP 2800+ processors which I ran for a few years then built an Athlon 64 system. I do have an old asrock 775 dual vtsa board I used as a test rig back in late 2000s, handy due to having agp, pcie, DDR and ddr2 slots and sata, it had a 3.2 GHz p4 but recently found that an E8600 works in it, be it at the slower 1066 fsb. It makes a great XP retro rig with the 8600gt

[@SUCRA]

Welp, pentiums 4 are the best retro CPUs, we've determined that previously hah. On another note I actually didn't have a pentium 4 back in the day. You guessed it right, from pentium III I went athlon XP, and athlon64, to finally c2d. Great video!👍

[@thesmokingcap]

Great video Phil! I love the good ol P4 as well. It helped so many enjoy PC gaming when the core 2 duo or athlon 64 was out of reach. I bought my first gaming PC for $200 and it had one of those intel motherboards. They're rather solid

[@omegarugal9283]

the netburst architecture peaked with the northwood, if they only had made a die shrink of it instead of the presscott it may held on while the core was ready

[@HAZRDOne]

I grew up with 98 and XP. My first Pc was a Packard Bell that had a pentium 3 and a sound blaster in it and ran 98se. Nowadays my retro pc of choice is an XP machine that has a Q6700 on an Asrock 4coredual sata2, 4gb Corsair XMS2, HD3850 Agp, Audigy 2ZS, and a WD VelociRaptor.

[@klocugh12]

Greetings from Poland! And yeah, Painkiller is great. There is also a Supernatural mod to it, but it is somewhat buggy. IMO it plays better than original other than that though, and has a lot of bonus content.

[@EpicTyphlosionTV]

I still have an old gaming PC from 2005 with a Pentium 4 660. It's pretty good, and the 64-bit plus SSE3 means I can run newer stuff on it.

[@lucasrem]

EpicTyphlosionTV WHAT GPU U USE ? Try new GPU, all my LGA 775 intels still run all titles in 1080p

[@EpicTyphlosionTV]

@lucasrem AMD Radeon HD 7570. I know it's not period correct, but it was the only thing I had lying around. Luckily the machine doesn't have any issues with GPU-heavy games lol

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

Netburst Nightmares

[@blakegriplingph]

I always wanted a Pentium 4 back when they were in the market; I didn't honestly know what was horridly wrong with them until much later. Also, Intel's insistence on the megahertz race at the time caused Crytek to code CryENGINE 2 with Pentium 4s in mind hence why the original Crysis release scaled very poorly on multicore systems even to this day.

[@dmc2555]

The game simply supports two threads. There was no chance for scaling. actually runs best on an C2D E8600🤗

[@lucasrem]

Crysis, CryEngine 2, that was Core Quad Extreme days, Nvidia 8800 GTX ! we already trashed Pentium hard back then, the video's are still online, check it again please. That were the scripts, running in CryEngine 2, on Core 8800 GTX or 9800 GTX !

[@JamesSmith-sw3nk]

Socket 775 cpu's were the most fun to overclock and play around with. I have a 13700k in my office pc and overclocking gives next to no improvement. (I actually under-volt it.)

[@filipetmarcal]

Amazing review ❤❤

[@r.d.7698]

I think Cedar Mill is a low-TDP option for those win98 compatible late i865g agp 775 boards.

[@TheComputerGuy96]

I have a machine with a Pentium 4 631 (same thing as the 661, just 3.0 GHz instead of 3.6). I wanted to put Windows 98 on it but this hardware is a little too new. My motherboard has Intel 955X chipset which is only supported on Windows 2000 or newer.

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

Intel SpaceHeater inside 👍👍 Yes we did, and I currently have a 3.0ghz Pentium 4 HT retro gaming machine to enjoy. A sony Vaio I rescued from e waste. Amazingly there are no bad caps on the baord

[@osgrov]

Honestly the performance surprises me a bit, looking good! I'm tempted now, hehe.. I never had a P4 back in the day, I was stuck with a Coppermine system up until I got my E8600, which to date is my favorite PC and my main XP machine. :) Good point on PCIe too, that certainly makes things a lot easier - not to mention cheaper.

[@sjogosPT]

Its terrible. 20k in 3dmark 2001 barely beats an old athlon XP released years before.

[@osgrov]

@@sjogosPT sure, but we are talking P4 now, that's what I commented on. This is a lot faster than the earlier P4s, for sure.

[@VikingDudee]

Never owned a p4 for my main PC, it was always Athlon during them times, But I have gotten a few P4's to work on and I was never impressed with them to ever consider the switch, usually ended up giving them away if I was able to get a system with one.

[@Lady_Zenith]

The biggest issue with Pentium IV was that Prescott (and even Cedarmill) brought basically no performance improvements compared to the Northwood. The 3,06 HT Northwood was out in November 2002, and between that and Core2 release of mid 2006, the performance gains made by Intel were like 15%. 15% in 3,5 years is horrible. It was worse than the great 4-core stagnation era before Ryzen. The new P4 brought SSE3, NX-disable bit, VT-X accelerated virtualization, 64-bit, etc, etc. But the single-threaded gaming performance did not really improve from Nortwood.

[@Trick-Framed]

My personal P4 rig was 3ghz. Had a Radeon X1950XT. 2GBs. Loved it. Was an amazing experience. My last was a 661. I got it to max out the slot in 2010 to give to a friend. It worked but it was slow in 2010. Especially for DVD playback.

[@steeviebops]

I have a 631 here, the 65W stepping. I used it in a motherboard that doesn't support Core 2s. Runs reasonably well.

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice!

[@mtunayucer]

i like the lga 775 pentium 4's because many agp lga775 boards only support up to pentium 4, and cedar mill is the best option there.

[@lucasrem]

You better collect the early Core 775 boards only, they support all older Pentiums too, and DDR 3 !

[@Txm_Dxr_Bxss]

As far as I know some of the later Pentium 4 could run Windows 10 64 bit. It's only Socket 754 and 939 Athlon 64s that miss the instruction.

[@philscomputerlab]

You are right Cedar Mill runs 10.

[@lucasrem]

all Pentiums are x64

[@OverTallman]

As long as the processor has CMPXCHG16B instruction and supports LAHF and SAHF instructions in 64-bit mode, it can run Win10 64-bit. AMD 64-bit CPUs in DDR platforms (Socket 754, 939 and 940) lack CMPXCHG16B instruction so they can't run Win10 64-bit. Cedar Mill and Presler chips have the instructions aforementioned so they can definitely run Win10 64-bit (albeit very slow), I think a few of the later high end Prescott and Smithfield chips have them as well.

[@manaphylv100]

I never had a Pentium 4 of any flavor, because they were stupidly overpriced compared to the Athlons and Opterons where I live (New Zealand). They were sometimes over twice the cost for the same level of performance. I had a Duron 600 or 700 MHz, which I was able to unlock to 1 GHz with the famous pencil-mod. It was still terrible due to the lack of cache, but I couldn't afford a proper Athlon back then - the extra ~$100 was a lot for a 13-year-old! When I got enough money a few years later, I just went straight to the Athlon 64, since I had no idea whether my old motherboard with SDR RAM could support the Athlon XPs. I got an Opteron 150, which was the equivalent of the A64 4000+, but at half the price (it was likely a pricing error, but the shop honored the sale anyway.)

[@Kordanor]

I think having 2 cores might also introduce new problems. If I remember correctly Starcraft 2 needed a patch otherwise the scrolling would bug out with more than one core. But not every game is fortunate enough to get supported that long, so I guess there are also several games which just wont work on multi-core CPUs properly anymore. I am not sure if you could easily disable additional cores on all models, but then also the P4 performance might be better. My first Multicore CPU was a Phenom II X3 720, which I probably only remember because it was weird to have a 3 core CPU. I dont remember what I had right before that, just that it wasn't an Intel. That said, around year 2005 or so, the crazy hardware race was also kinda over and progress began to slow down. On top of that MMOs became a thing I spent lots of time with, so up-to-date hardware became less and less important, and with that also my connection to it.

[@suspectedstar]

I'd love to see some more info on the mainboards towards the end-of-life of the AGP 8x slot. Such as the 775-DUAL-VSTA and its custom BIOS and the asrock alivedual-esata2.

[@r4z4m4t4z]

thanks again, well done! well i didnt then, but i do now have a 641 waiting for an ultra690i mb recap. then i need to get a couple of evga gpu for some sli, not sure which ones yet

[@userperson5259]

I've got a couple of these P4s around myself.. one of them is Cedar Mill.. the other is Northwoods I think. They're both usable for sure.. One of them is a NAS on my network right now, running the 32-bit EasyNAS software. Great little file server. The other is an XP machine for my 8 yr old son and it is great for him.

[@Dragonfire511]

125W TDP!. Wow!, That's PressHOT.😂. I had an Athlon XP 2600+ back in the day, paired with an Nvidia 5200FX. Decent for its time. I still have that machine working too.

[@Brazkainetsb]

Love it or hate it, you guys have to admit that P4 is fun to work with and have some interesting stuff like double pumped ALU.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

The 8K L1 cache is brutal, though, along with the shaky nature of the trace cache. The P4 is kind of like designing a huge plane that carries a lot of cargo but forgetting that you can't responsibly launch a thing like that from a random local airport.

[@AeiKei]

Bought a P4 system in late 2006 wich I upgraded to a E4400 a bit later. Had a ECS motherboard with combo DDR/DDR2 slots and combo AGP/PCI-Xpress slots

[@ThiagoPerroni]

The Cedarmill has 2MB cache, and litograph sixti five nm, less hotter than prescott (90nm), and faster because the 2MB cache, and has some features like the presler cores (Pentium D)

[@Super123456789Kuba]

This is interesting, since everyone was calling Netburst... Well okay... CrapBurst. But you know... I still find it a little weird that they really wanted to push that Netburst and their RDRAM... Seems like they tried their hardest to make AMD as a much more viable option. I never played Far Cry 1 on 1 Core CPU until Athlon 64, funnily enough. (Although mostly testing the waters of how it works and such, In Multiplayer mode. As a "Listen" server. Or at least that's what Call of Duty 2003 calls that kind of server that ain't LAN or Internet.) I played only on 2 and 4 Threaded CPUs. And I'm curious to beat that game on Athlon 64 one day, because why not. I've built that PC so I could do that. 8:08 A little funfact (Or perhaps not) - I remember that I didn't the fact that in Order to play Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 YOU HAD to run Steam. Like, why? So I couldn't play it on XP anymore? And nobody will remember the days when some of the 2009-2011 titles still ran on Windows XP thanks to Steam killing XP's support? And also now 7's Support? 10:24 Nice to hear that you like my country, that fills me with joy :D I do understand the nostalgia factor for Pentium 4 - When you had it, and had great time with - Great, but personally I never had a Pentium 4. Myself, I went from Socket A into Socket 775 with Core 2 Duo E8500. So I have nostalgia for C2D, but none for Pentium 4, and as a... I guess... "Outsider"? Hard to say... I just picked what is (potentially) more easy to work with and it just was better historically. And also being a Pre-C2D/Athlon 64 X2 Generation, sort of speak. (Athlon 64, Socket 754.) And in terms of how it looked for me with old PCs? Well, I started with Celeron 400 MHz, Socket 370, I only remember playing The Settlers II on it (Which is funny, since it's still for me the best The Settlers Title out there.) then Socket A, Athlon 1100, played games like CMR 2.0, Rally Championship 2000, Ford Racing 2, Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, The Italian Job and Toy Story 2, Windows XP, but the biggest boom happend with C2D E8500, also Windows XP, and games buying craze happend. Need For Speed Most Wanted 2005, The Settlers - Rise of an Rise Empire, All Call of Duty Games from 2003 to 2011, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Far Cry (2004) and that's only a surface of what games I played. And also seeing those games I had on previous PCs working even better on that Core 2 Duo PC was also something special. So yeah, I definitely have some bias towards Socket 775 that I see only the whole Core 2 Duo generation in that. For me Core 2 Duo was my Peak gaming. What's Retro for me? Well... I would say that the games that had Pentium 4/Athlon 64 as their minimum CPU in their system requirements. Newer games than that don't count as Retro for me, since some of those games that require like a Core 2 Duo or Athlon 64 X2 still look modern, I guess a bit "Outdated Modern" But still.

[@philscomputerlab]

Awesome comment thank you!

[@Super123456789Kuba]

@@philscomputerlab No problem, Thank you for reading 🙂 Oh, And I noticed I forgot to mention one thing, Oops 😅 - That Socket 370 PC had Windows 98 there, and it works even after all those years!... The HDD itself maybe not so much, (I mean... It had it's better days, you know.) but once 98 is loaded after some time it still works. So that's the whole reason why my bias is more towards that, instead of something like Windows ME.

[@xnonsuchx]

I went from 486 to AMD Athlon CPUs until the Core2Duo came out, so never had a Pentium 4.

[@matthewkriebel7342]

I played Far Cry on a Duron 850. Came bundled free with a GeForce FX 5600. I think I ran that computer until 2006 when I got my Athlon 64.