The Very Best of Intel's Worst - $1000 Pentium D Extreme 965

[@JamesSmith-sw3nk]

4.6ghz is a great overclock, I remember around 4.25ghz being the ceiling for most people who owned that cpu. Good video.

[@SterkeYerke5555]

That motherboard is a lot better than what people were using in 2006 though. And I suspect the same probably goes for the power supply and maybe even the cooler. All of that probably adds up

[@danthompsett2894]

@@SterkeYerke5555 yeah very impressive, though i suspect most people wouldnt push the voltage much past 1.45v over 1.5v has always been risky extreme overclocking territory, plus he mightve gotten a decent bin of that cpu silicon, that said large heatpipe heatsinks werent really a thing back in 2006.

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks! I did get it to run 1 round of R15 at 4.7 GHz, but it was really instable at point.

[@FullyBuffered]

I think so as well. Motherboard designs came a long way in just a few years during that period.

[@SterkeYerke5555]

@@danthompsett2894Large heatpipe heatsinks weren't, but water cooling was. If you were spending a thousand 2006 dollars on a cpu you might as well've been water cooling. That said, having water cooling doesn't mean you want to fry the chip within a few years with over 1.5V

[@PixelPipes]

I remember when this CPU came out, the stock cooler Intel supplied wasn't even enough to keep it cool at its rated clockspeed.

[@FullyBuffered]

I bet there were many people running these chips with inadequate cooling... Coolers came a long way in just a few years during that period.

[@polaxis842]

@@FullyBuffered Or the PC cases back then were also not helping. We came a long way in case-airflow-design since the early 2000s. Amazing video. Oldschool Northwood user here.

[@masterofallclasses7287]

I am amazed of how capable that cpu still is. And boy do i love the lga775 motherboards, had a collection of almost all top tier boards from that era with the massive copper radiators.

[@ghostinashell420]

Same here,i dont have where to keep them😂got a Gigabyte X38,Gigabyte EP45 and few Asus P5QL ones.Socket 775 is the ultimate consumer friendly socket.

[@GraveUypo]

it's no capable at all. the things it can do are the things that can be gpu accelerated. it's an absolute dog of a cpu. i bought a pentium 4 a few years back because it was dirt cheap and for fun, and i had a lot of fun setting up a period correct pc, and owning my first ever pentium4 was cool (from amd k7 - the slot-type athlon, up to the athlon x2 era, i was full AMD. it was only when i saw how much better core2 was over amd x2 that i switched back), but for modern stuff, man, it's so slow... that core2quad, on the other hand, yeah, you can live on that even today.

[@FullyBuffered]

Ignoring the efficiency compared to modern chips, I'd guess many people would probably be just fine with this chip for basic computing needs.

[@MrSamadolfo]

@@GraveUypo 🙂 i have a Core2Quad that i'm putting in a new case and just for fun I've been using it for a few days, it installs and runs Windows 11 Pro, my 750ti works ok with it, a video game called Bee Simulator works ok with it, i tried to run Cyberpunk 2077 but it would not launch, however if u try to run Cyberpunk 2077 on the next platform up which i also have an i7-870 the game would launch and run just fine. Kinda interesting.

[@myk1_sp]

@@MrSamadolfo I'd guess it's from the C2Q not having the SSE4.2 instruction sets, whereas the i7-870 and later generations did have them.

[@ironhead2008]

Considering how well this thing handled well optimized games like Doom, it makes me wonder how a true multicore implementation of netburst might have performed. These things being unable to communicate directly was a big bottleneck. Phil's Computer Lab compared a standard Presler Pentium D @ 3.6 GHZ (Dual core but no HT) to a Cedar Mill Pentium (single core HT enabled) at the same speed and found that the true dual core gave almost no bump over the single core with hyperthreading! Intel's decision to disable HT on most consumer dual cores made them utterly pointless: you could pick up a Prescott 2M or a Cedar Mill later and get the same performance for likely less money.

[@CompatibilityMadness]

"true multicore" ? You mean actual 4 cores or more ? It would be a disaster of epic proportions, like 4x CPU based P4 servers. You can test it with 2x Xeon 5080 CPUs and server MB.

[@ironhead2008]

@@CompatibilityMadness I mean an actual dual core implementation like the Core2Duo or Athlon X2 as opposed to the 2 single cores on one die mess that the Pendium D and its Xeon siblings used.

[@CompatibilityMadness]

@@ironhead2008 Netburst was never meant to "talk" over cache or crossbar switch like K8 stuff does. That was why Pentium D line-up was more temporary thing, than actual solution. Forcing a re-do of uarch to make it capable of "true multicore", would probably mean so many changes, that such processor wouldn't be Netburst anymore.

[@ironhead2008]

@@CompatibilityMadness Hmm, seemed like the first CoreDuos were basically Pentium M Yonah cores with some tweaking (I think shared bus interface cache controllers) to make it a dual core. Was Yonah originally designed with dual core functionality when Intel started work on it?

[@CompatibilityMadness]

@@ironhead2008 Yes.

[@Wokiis]

Nice! You're always delivering perfectly on the kinds of curiosity itches I always end up having. I can only assume that "The very best of AMD's Worst" featuring an overclocked FX-9590 on a beefy FX990 motherboard is somewhere in the planning stage ;) I have a bit of a modern repeat of Intel history as my daily driver right now. The 10980XE, with a moderate overclock and optimization done to cache and memory clock. Got it in 2020 and the idea is to run with it for at least 10 years. So far so good!

[@Trick-Framed]

The FX 8350 is the best to put on a 990FX chipset board. Like the Sabertooth. I have an Asus 990x, which has the same VRMs as their 990FX and I have their Sabertooth 990FX. I also have an FX 9590, the extreme version with the 120mm AIO (It JUST keeps that chip running, it is not for overclocking, just keeping noise down). No matter how I go about it I can reach higher stable clocks on the 8350 than I can with the 9590 and the benchmarks and FPS in games are always better. In fact, with a Cryorig H7 I can get a 4.7 Ghz all core with a 5Ghz Turbo core, just like the 9590. And that is on an older air cooler. On a Coolerguys 240 watt tdp vapor chamber cooler I can get a 5Ghz all core and a 5.2Ghz Turbo core. I can get up to 5.6Ghz but it's not stable. But if doing a best of the worst? I fully recommend the FX 9590 with 120mm AIO so you can see just how futile the overclocking situation is. People thought they'd get 5.5 Ghz OCs with these just to find out these weren't binned well and have almost zero headroom in most cases.

[@Pasi123]

I moved from X58 to X299 in November last year, from a X5670 6c/12t @ 4.4GHz to an i9-10900X 10c/20t. My goal is to run X299 for at least the rest of this decade and possibly upgrading from the 10900X to a 10940X or 10980XE sometime over the years, if I can find one for cheap enough.

[@SiliconPower74]

@@Trick-Framed I got the 9590 thinking I could OC but nope, it doesnt. Even 5GHz all core is hard. However I can run a 8350 easily at 5.1GHz. I use an Arctic LF2 360 and temps are low, less than 50ºC. I always hit the Vcore limit (1.55v) before heat is a problem

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks! Glad to hear :) The 10980XE is an awesome chip, which I do suspect will age quite well.

[@johncate9541]

@@SiliconPower74 I had the same experience. I was able to hit 5.2 GHz on air with an 8350 (albeit VERY loud), but those 9xx0 series processors had trouble running over stock at all on the same hardware.

[@mtaufiqnmtn]

After all these years, welcome back dude

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you! I'm glad to be posting a video again :)

[@SinaFarhat]

Nice! Good to see you!

[@FullyBuffered]

Many thanks! I'm glad to finally post a video again :)

[@ruojautuma1]

Technically there is still one way to go even further: I believe Xeon 5080 was the server version of this chip and you could run them in dual socket systems giving you up to 4c/8t of Netburst supremacy! Heck some motherboards even supported quad channel RAM to go with them.

[@toaster_bloke9999]

4 Pentium 4 cores? "I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of power supplies suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

[@ruojautuma1]

@@toaster_bloke9999You know you want one though!

[@FullyBuffered]

If I can source the parts, I'd love to take Netburst a step further ;)

[@HeyItsDyl]

@@FullyBuffered Ive seen them floating around on ebay, definitely doable for proooobably not too much.

[@xPLAYnOfficial]

LGA 775 as a whole is still very snappy on Windows with an SSD installed. This is almost entirely due to how Windows 10 deals with the lack of modern CPU instructions on the platform: it basically debloats itself, substituting the newer routines for older ones that came straight out of Windows 7, thus making the system as-a-whole surprisingly-snappy for it's age. This is something that is pretty much only done on 775 CPUs, because Microsoft was quoted as specifically targeting them for low-end compatibility when they were making Windows 8, which later became 8.1, and which pretty much is what 10 was for a long time (before 20H1). Modern 22H2 Windows 10 still has all of those older routines just sitting there, and still chooses to disable a lot of the more advanced features and use the older routines every time you install to one of these chips (this is also why moving a drive over to a 775 rig from a newer one is MUCH worse-performing than doing a fresh installation on the 775 machine directly; the older routines aren't used and instead they are effectively achieved through software, which these older CPUs need every cycle they can get).

[@TheXppp1]

That makes me wonder, would it be possible to do the same optimizations for modern processors or would giving up the new instructions make performance worse on them

[@xPLAYnOfficial]

@@TheXppp1 I suspect it would be worse since a lot of the newer processors have architectures that are typically optimized with the newer instruction sets in mind; the older ones are left in to retain compatibility with older programs.

[@MrSamadolfo]

🙂 thats interesting, I did not know that, thx

[@flintfrommother3gaming]

What instructions specifically? AVX is useless, SSE 4.2 existed in Pentiums (It didn't, my bad but still, correct me), what else are there to actually speed up the process. Genuinely asking.

[@soratsuki469]

​@flintfrommother3gaming SSE 4.2 is first available in Nehalem (1st gen Core after Core 2) though.

[@fmt1890]

Oh yeah, interesting Chip, keeps you warm during the winter. I still got one P-EE 965 lying around. Perhaps you should build a 4x Socket 604 Tulsa Server, those were actually the fastes NetBurst CPUs ever made, with 16MB L3 Cache :D

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks! I would love to find a quad 604 board!

[@RichardArkax]

i knew you were about to drop an absolute banger 🗣️

[@bramvandenbroeck5060]

The Pentium D is not actually a "dual core", it's more a dual cpu, why? Because a true dual core can crosstalk, the cores are in direct connection, but the Pentium D's cores need to talk over the Northbridge, and that's is a huge performance hit, that is also why they are a lot slower than a real dual core.

[@Cooe.]

By this definition the Core2Quad isn't a quad core. 🤷 This is a slippery ass slope.

[@benjib2691]

@@Cooe. I kind of remember reading that Conroe and Wolfdale cores do communicate through the CPU package on Core 2 Quads, which is quite a bit quicker than passing through the Northbridge like Pentium Ds do. Which might explain why a Core 2 Quad is far quicker in multi-core tasks than the equivalent Core 2 Duo at the same clock speed relative to what a Pentium D performed like at the same clock speed as its Pentium 4 counterpart with HT enabled.

[@Cooe.]

@@benjib2691 This is wrong. All CPU to CPU communication is done through the Northbridge on Core 2. You are misremembering.

[@DragonBane299]

Welcome back, what a pleasant surprise! Genuinely impressed by how the Pentium D was still able to run videos at 1080p let alone 4K with stutters

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you! I was surprised as well!

[@mecha2001]

@@FullyBuffered I was looking at the channel and was like oh no, it's been a year. and then I found this. excellent content as always.

[@joshreiman]

Welcome back! Excellent video! I have a Pentium D 960 that I bought new back in the day, and sometimes I dig it out to play around with. The board only has DDR(1) and AGP, but still fun to throw in a Radeon 3850 AGP and try modern software on them.

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

Since you're already holding a unicorn motherboard, maybe you could go after the ellusive Radeon HD4670 IceQ, which is the last Radeon card to be have an AGP version.

[@Wasmachineman]

​@@BrunodeSouzaLino 3850 is still faster in most games.

[@FullyBuffered]

Many thanks! :) That is definitely some fun hardware to play around with!

[@lucasrem]

@@Wasmachineman you can do RTX 4090 on PCIe too, getting less bandwidth only.

[@Wasmachineman]

@@lucasrem ...what

[@CompatibilityMadness]

This chip really needs faster FSB, since ALL between core communications goes through it. Maybe some FSB scaling tests 1333/1600MHz ? Side note : This is one of the first CPUs that supports Windows 10 x64.

[@FullyBuffered]

I tried a lot to get it to OC via FSB primarily instead of multiplier, but it wasn't stable with anything over 280. Perhaps because of the 4x4GB DDR3?

[@CompatibilityMadness]

@@FullyBuffered Unless you tweaked strap/transaction booster and FSB Termination, it's possible Auto settings weren't stable. Board is optimised for Core 2.

[@lucasrem]

FSB for the extreme was 1600

[@CompatibilityMadness]

@@lucasrem Only for QX9770/9775.

[@humnaset]

I owned a Pentium D 820. Coming from Pentium 4 2.2 GHz, it felt a huge upgrade and so futuristic having a dual core cpu

[@peep39]

Great stuff. Would love a dive into Nehalem, my favorite architecture

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you!

[@donaldnemesis393]

I like how 4.4ghz pentium extreme 965 even slower than A6-6310, i5-520m, Core 2 Duo P8700, 3ghz athlon 7750BE and even a4-5300

[@lucasrem]

You needed the Extreme editions back then, that Quad Core extreme was faster as most first gen Core Duo CPU's too

[@buitreador]

is on par with a Pentium Dual Core E2180

[@mylittlepwny3447]

Love these old videos reviewing old tech i couldnt afford when i was still a young teenager!

[@FullyBuffered]

That's why I make them :)

[@ND22M]

Welcome back! Very good video; Netburst at its peak! I have a retro system built around a Pentium D 960 because EE is considered collector's item and is so expensive and in Windows 7 is performing pretty good. I would love to see what a socket 939 FX-60 can do today; most likely the 4gb limit on the motherboard would be a serious bottleneck! PS: liked!

[@FullyBuffered]

Many thanks! :)

[@laskaofalaska]

Oh hey, welcome back!

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you! :)

[@mig-31firefox91]

Welcome back! Can’t wait to see what this instalment of tech archeology has in store for us today!

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you!

[@illiabrazhko3290]

Wow, this was a very interesting experiment to watch. Thanks!

[@maxiboyfm3a]

Wow i remember reading reviews for the EE chip in 2006, we didn’t know at the time the core2 series was coming at the end of the year.

[@FullyBuffered]

It was a very strange launch indeed

[@lucasrem]

As i remember well, it was DELL systems only, not reviewed for gamers at all..

[@XodiumLabs]

This video is quite well timed, as I'm actually kinda sorta moving into this era of retrocomputing and it's just...fascinating to me all over again.

[@johnhudson7055]

I loved my Northwood p4. I recently bought all the parts to rebuild my 3.06GHz Northwood p4, the first hyperthreaded cpu.

[@renyn21]

Over 10 years ago I used to have a pentium 4 524. Thing was slow as mollasses on the desktop even. It could not do smooth 720p on youtube no matter what I did. I had a gtx 650 (got a good deal on that, I wanted an hd 5450 just to have directx11 support but was offered the gtx and took it), which supported video decoding just fine. It was one of my first hand me down pc's, I had 2 gb of ddr2, I tried playing the league of legends of the time, it ran at 12 fps. Only thing I changed once I could get more parts was the hp motherboard (it didn't support core 2 for some reason or I'd have kept it) and the cpu. Same 2 sticks of ddr2, same hard drive, gpu, psu, everything stayed. New cpu was an e7500. Its like it unlocked that computer. The gpu could now take over and play 1080p video like nothing. League ran at well over 100 fps. I never understood why that pentium 4 was quite that bad. I still have it somewhere. I doubt anyone would care to compare the mystery of why it was that bad to slightly less ancient hardware, but I remember it didn't like modern os's. Under windows 7, crysis 1, looking at the sky lowest settings, it would not go above 30 fps. Same scenario but under windows xp it would go to 100. Of course looking at the forest and actually trying to play it was back to 20, but even looking in the sky, something was holding it back. 64 bit to 32 bit win7 also made a difference. I thought it might have been lack of some instruction, or slow fsb, or who knows, but the way it couldn't allow the gpu to decode video properly always puzzled me and I always thought netburst was one huge failure. I booted it a few years ago off a windows 10 ssd, I could still tell it was taking way too long even for right clicking the desktop and browsing the file manager, after windows was done doing background tasks.

[@RedstoneNguyen]

Top notch quality content as always!

[@tech4mooo801]

Welcome back! it was a long 11 months.

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you! It was quite a time yeah...

[@carlolalattacosterbosa5821]

Great video as always! thanks for the entertainig!

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you! You're welcome :)

[@twood1130]

I have a 965 extreme and it reports without the ES in windows 10. Don't know why yours does.

[@FullyBuffered]

It could be a different stepping!

[@CopperPopperComputers]

I did not even watch the whole video yet but decided to drop an early comment.. Thanks for uploading a new video.. God bless you with more success, mate ❤

[@FullyBuffered]

Many thanks for the kinds words, that means a lot :)

[@CristhianArchundia.01]

Amazing test setup. What I find incredible is that you managed to work with 16gb of ram, since in the manual of this motherboard says that the maximum capacity is 8gb. Beyond that, what a relic to have a motherboard with the x48 chipset, support for ddr3 and the ability to overclock. It would be amazing if you could build the most powerful lga 775 PC in the world with your QX9775 with overclock and 16gb of DDR3 ram and make a video of how it performs in 2024. Even run games like Control, Red Dead Redemption 2 or Cyberpunk 2077 with the "sse fix".

[@Jabe_VeX]

Fully buffered: *is gone for almost a year* *comes back with an absolutely banger video n no explanation* True chad (im sorry if you maybe mentioned a reason on a different social media or smth)

[@FullyBuffered]

Haha thank you! I'm glad to be posting a video again. I've just been very busy with other things

[@phillycheesetake]

I like "tallest dwarf" parts, like the D965, the FX5200 ultra, MX460, 754 Athlon 4000 etc. There's something about a hamstrung technology trying it's hardest that makes me root for it. There's actually a youtuber, HighTreason610, who used a Pentium D in his main workstation rig for 12 years, and he made a video about it called "Pentium D 965 (With liquid cooling lecture)", a bit long, but quite a rare insight into the experience of someone who actually used one of these "dead ender" chips for a very long time.

[@N3rdyg33kzor]

Excellent video! It makes me want to dig out my 965EE and play with it again! Got any plans to play around with a dual Xeon 5080 build? Quad core Netburst is a very interesting thing. Doom 2016 REALLY likes the extra cores

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you! I would love to source some multi socket Netburst parts for a video...

[@sgdude1337]

Very cool build. The largest performance upgrade I ever experienced was going from a netburst based 2005 era celeron D to a core 2 quad in 2007. Netburst certainly was disappointing. I’m sure if I bought a Athlon 64 X2 at release instead of the Celeron it would have lasted me a lot longer. I would love to see a build like this with a 2060 instead just to see if ray tracing is possible with a netburst chip.

[@EthanAQueen]

II acquired one of these CPUs quite a while ago but have yet to build a system around it. For C2D and C2Q, the platform really starts to shine once you up the FSB to 450Mhz+. Back then I only had a DDR2 board but was running at a 480Mhz FSB with the RAM at 960 which is faster than DDR3-1066 due to the higher latency of DDR3. It will be interesting to see how the 965 performs with a much higher bus speed than stock as well as with faster RAM.

[@FullyBuffered]

I agree, for this video I was happy with the current multiplier overclock, but ideally a higher FSB and memory speeds would be even better

[@sparki_]

that's a very impressive overclock! very surprising it held up as much as it did while playing youtube video and running those games considering its age

[@billchildress9756]

I have one of these CPUs except it's an engineering sample. It would run @4.25 ghz and running Win XP it would show up in Device Manager as a 6.0 ghz x4 because of Hyper Threading. I was running with a stock cooler and not enough PSU at the time, But easy to OC and very stable! I did not have a water cooling solution at the time and I still have it.. And it's little brother the single core EE 3.73. Really fun to mess with.

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks for sharing!

[@woldemunster9244]

That power draw was all over the place and the drop of thermal paste... What about thermals? Was that cooler enough for 120W+?

[@captmaverickable]

Another Fully Buffered video!!!

[@malvage0]

Thanks for covering this CPU, this is the first in-depth video I saw about it. But I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in the overclocking result, the thing that separates the Pentium D 965 from the rest, in terms of overclocking, is that it has an unlocked multiplier, so, what you're supposed to do, is try to push the FSB as high as it will go, and lower the multiplier accordingly. Keeping the CPU to a 270*17 multiplier is absolutely killing it's performance, making it not too dissimilar from an ordinary Pentium D 945 at the same frequency. What is happening is that the two dies can't communicate fast enough with each other due to the slow FSB. I think a 350*13 might be doable, and, with with an appropriate motherboard North Bridge voltage increase, maybe even 400*11.5(If the cpu supports half steps), both would require some retuning on those tight RAM timings, however the 400MHz FSB result would end up in the RAM actually being able to run at it's rated speed. Would be cool to see a retest with a higher FSB frequency!

[@kyoudaiken]

Some more experiments you could do: Use a relatively modern Radeon card. The Radeon drivers are much less CPU intensive. Also you could try DXVK, which translates from DirectX to Vulkan. This way you might see another performance boost!

[@FullyBuffered]

I actually did also test with a HD 7970 and it scored 2 FPS more on average in Tomb Raider, but in GTA V performance was worse compared to the GTX 1060, so in the end I stuck with the 1060. I do plan on getting a newer AMD card in the future for testing...

[@dylanrush184]

LGa775 is always going to have this special place in my memory of computer building. I had a Pentium D 805 back in the day overclocked like crazy just using FSB. On my work bench right now I have a Pentium D 945 with a new 240mm AIO water cooler. And an RTX 3080 on the same board. Going for benchmark world records with obscure hardware combinations. I also did the same with a QX6700 engineering sample. Really cool platform. So fun to play around with

[@Carstuff111]

As someone that used an Intel Pentium 4 machine for a long while, I can say that the Northwood core P4s were my favorite. They often overclocked VERY well, and the Prescott cores were not enough of a bump in performance clock for clock to make them worth the heat loads they created. That said, when I went to my first AMD Athlon 64 machine on Socket 939, what a HUGE upgrade that was! And then I got my first dual core CPU, an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and ran that a long while, then upgraded into an AMD Phenom II X6 1045T and ran that machine well into the AMD FX and Intel Core series stuff. I went back to Intel when I got into an Intel Core i5 3570K in 2017 because it was a hell of a beast back then for the money. And then, 2019 I went back to AMD with a Ryzen 5 1600X on a B450M motherboard, and now running a Ryzen 5 5600X on the same B450M board. I should add that all of my computers, except my P4 machine, were bought used and/or put together from new and used parts. The P4 system was the only one I ever had from brand new.

[@FullyBuffered]

That is good to hear from someone who had a Northwood in period - thanks for the comment!

[@kyoudaiken]

The legend is back!! We missed you!

[@FullyBuffered]

Many thanks! :)

[@smithjackson98]

I am still using Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 and watching your video.😊 My CPU-Z and Windows Manager is shown Intel?Pentium?D CPU 3.46GHz

[@kalsvtg5169]

Funny, it's almost as fast as a Pentium J2900 aka the "best" Atom. 130W vs 10W. Crazy.

[@stevef6392]

Having a WDDM 2.7 capable video card with hardware VP9 decoding really helps with web browsing and KZbin. I recently tested a Pentium M @ 2.9GHz with a GTX 1050 under Win10 22H2 x86. I was was floored--floored, I tell you--at how well it ran. I did have to turn off Windows Update, which otherwise would've tried to consume the entire 1C/1T CPU. But yeah, with Win Update off, it had no problem playing 1080p/60 VP9 KZbin video.

[@FullyBuffered]

That sounds like an awesome setup :) I too was amazed how well this ran...

[@cromulence]

Great video! I didn't realise that Intel demoed Conroe before this chip actually released. Why on earth did they bother releasing this? Surely someone astute enough to follow enthusiast CPUs would've seen that it was pointless investing in one of these with Conroe on the horizon. Nice to see this chip being put through its paces at least!

[@ironhead2008]

It wasn't for enthusiasts. It was purely for marketing or to keep OEMs like Dell from bolting, like damn near everything associated with the Pentium D.

[@Wushu-viking]

Impressive, they managed to squeeze two TOTL P4-HT in the same chip. And in summer 2006, Core 2 Duo Conroe arrived, with around twice the IPC at even lower power. Imagine buying this for $1000, and see a better (stock performing) E6300 with it's MSRP of $183 a few months later. Then again it might have been an investment for the long run, because it now enters the "Collectible" class of CPU's. Same happened to the Geforce DDR etc. I remember I upgraded from the Athlon T-bird 1GHz (OC to 1.3) to the C2D E6400 in late 2006. I read about the new Core 2 Duo, and for that value, I knew it was time to upgrade. Never had/used a Pentium 4 based PC myself. I've build/sold some.

[@crayzeape2230]

It would be very interesting to see how the DX11 games play with the DXVK (DirectX to Vulcan) library. They could see a good boost in FPS.

[@drebolacat2469]

the ddr3 in my testing is definitely helpful, in synthetics my pentium 4 scored slightly higher in Cinebench r15, but strangely didn’t change my pentium d result? My guess is the Hyperthreading is the difference

[@vicolin6126]

Probably one of the most OP Pentium D-builds ever :)

[@lucasrem]

DELL people liked them, gamers did the AMD Athlon 64 back then

[@gordonfreeman320]

Welcome back!

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you! :)

[@StaelTek]

I have a Pentium D 930. I managed a 4.9 GHz stable, just for fun. I would love to give the 965 a 5 GHz attempt on my MAXIMUS II FORMULA board!

[@FullyBuffered]

I tried to keep the voltage somewhat conservative here ;)

[@StaelTek]

@@FullyBuffered to be fair, mine was running 1.6V i think and my NH D15 couldn’t keep up anymore. But i also think it would benefit from higher quality silicon like the 965, and not having to worry about FSB changes.

[@tamasstrezi]

I remember Intel chaps coming to us(EA Chertsey), and giving a presentation about this. At the end there was a raffle, where the grand prize was one of these chips. I wont, as a physics guy already doing parallel programming on the consoles, it may not have been completely random draw ;) Anyhow, it was on Ebay shortly after :D

[@FullyBuffered]

Haha that's a great story, thanks for sharing!

[@SPNG]

Great video, you don't see Pentium D's tested too much these days. It doesn't do as bad as I would have expected, but the bar wasn't high to begin with 😅 I'm sure that no well-versed PC user would have gotten one of these chips at the time especially if they knew Conroe was coming, anyone who paid the price for one of these must have felt swindled a few months later 😆

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

Mainly because this is not a Pentium D. This is a Pentium Extreme Edition.

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks! :) I don't suspect many people bought these chips either, which is probably why they're so hard to come by these days haha

[@The_DreadStorm]

I still have a Gigabyte GA-P43-ES3G board running a 965XE, 4GB DDR2-1066, using XP. Runs like a champ, still. Really got cooking when I installed SSDs.

[@doink_v]

I had one of these chips. I remember it being horrible. Then I upgraded to a QX6700, I believe. It was a completely different galaxy of performance, it was unbelievable.

[@machinainc5812]

Great video mate. Your commentary is top notch. I feel like me watching a BBC documentary 😂

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you! That is the vibe I am aiming for yeah ;)

[@ronjatter]

I had two of these and neither would get anywhere near 4.6ghz. you got a really good one !

[@gabrielv.4358]

Impressive!

[@FixedFunction]

Might have needed a better board. The VRM limits of the 975x boards really dragged the 965 down. A higher tier X38, X48, or 790i will really bring out the best in these chips because it'll give them the 120A+ sustained current to really shine. All of these 965s can do 4.6-5.0GHz given they have enough amperage and cooling. Voltage goes to the moon on these.

[@PimpinBassie2]

There are 2 Intel architectures which leave me cold. Both were dead ends but the last one did a lot of damage. The first is Netburst/P4 for the obvious reasons (Watts/performance). The second one is Itanium, which killed off a lot of RISC architectures such as MIPS and Alpha.

[@stephenallen4635]

I remember this cpu mainly from a story I heard of a schools clueless IT guy buying these for the school computers... in 2012

[@johncate9541]

You could still buy them online fairly cheap as late as 2014. I had a cut-rate seller I used to buy parts from and they would hawk these using just their clock speed, because 3.73 GHz sounds impressive. I never bought CPUs there, but they had great deals on other stuff I'd use to build cheap desktops. Athlon X4 860K was where it was at for cheap CPUs at the time. Still have a few friends running them now.

[@user-vsmsdos]

Do you happen to have a 990X that you've tested? I've got a bit of a golden chip that's been lying around since I've upgraded to alderlake and if you wanted to make content on Gulftown's finest. I can loan you the processor, board is a Rampage III Extreme I can also loan you but it's stability is questionable after my last tinkerings with BCLK lol...

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks for the offer, I will keep it in mind! I'd like to cover the 990X eventually, it was an amazing chip!

[@user-vsmsdos]

@@FullyBuffered Well if you do this one went from 3.73 to 5.00 (and beyond) easily and heartily, was just limited by the thermal dissapation of an NH-D15 at the time.

[@Denisstrix]

To see the cpu temp would be nice with the overclock 😁 but cool video 😃

[@MrHav1k]

It was not only usable, but it could at least launch those games!!! Actually impressive!

[@megapro125]

tbf when using normal consumer CPU coolers from around the same time as the Pentium D pushing over 1.5V VCore would have been absolutely insane and guaranteed to fry the chip. 4.6 GHz on that thing would have been considered extreme overclocking at the time and not achievable by most people.

[@624static]

Makes me wanna dig out one of my 780i sli boards Miss this era of pc

[@FullyBuffered]

It was a very fun time, lots of interesting hardware innovations

[@TGuyHD]

Long time no see ! what do you think of thoes old amd epyc cpus on ebay ? is it worth buying ?

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks! I have been looking at those as well :) Issue is the motherboard prices of those chips remain quite high compared to the chip prices. If you can find a cheap board it could definitely be worth it!

[@TheLawnWanderer]

Penryn (45nm) can do close to 5ghz on watercooling, realistically more like 4.6ghz with daily voltages. Gotta be the best bins though, like X5470 and so on.

[@randalpapadum1312]

Good video 👍

[@lucasrem]

I own a 775 DDR 3 system too, i upgraded the CPU to Core Quad Q9650. Its not very slow, paired with a GTX 1080 and SSD

[@peter656Cats]

Can you compare it to Phenom II?

[@gecko2000405]

I'm still sporting a q6600. Waiting for Zen5 or Arrow Lake. Gone are the 386 to 486 days.

[@RoachDogggJR]

got a buddy who i gave a top of the line 4th gen i7 i got from a e waste pile. a chip that at one time retailed for 1600 bucks, just chilling in a pile of motherboards

[@HD7970]

My idea would be to slap a 420mm aio on it and push it as far as i can. If i can have my i9 7920x pulling 300+ watts on it i can only imagine what i could get with one of these.

[@GewelReal]

he's back!

[@FullyBuffered]

Yes! :)

[@kenh6096]

Would be nice to see how it does with an AMD GPU. For some reason they tended to work better on my old netburst systems than Nvidia did. I have you looked at the Pentium D based Xeons? You can't over clock them but quad core are plenty of RAM makes them more usable in the modern day than you think.

[@jrose-xp6tf]

The David Attenborough of CPUs...well done.

[@FullyBuffered]

Thanks haha

[@samdavidh]

I'd love to see this versus the last single-core Xeon

[@andrewx8888]

But can it run crysis?

[@FullyBuffered]

Shoot, forgot about Crysis haha

[@ma-saracen]

Man where have you been

[@FullyBuffered]

I've been busy with lots of other things

[@ma-saracen]

@@FullyBuffered glad you are back. KZbin algorithm sure will pick your content up.

Yes!, another Excellent video as always. 🤩 I have tried to get that cpu on eBay and I can't find it, I have a Dell XPS with a Pentium D 960 and I wanted to upgrade it to a Pentium D 965 or 955.

[@FullyBuffered]

Thank you! :)

[@Lurch-Bot]

The Core 2 Extreme X6800 does about the same in benchmarks without hyperthreading. This shows that the difference between P4 and Core 2 cannot be understated. A Q6600 blows this 'Extreme' Pentium D out of the water. Intel finally did manage to release a 6 GHz chip and, predictably, it is a space heater.

[@lucasrem]

I upgraded my x6800 system to the 9650 years ago, great DDR 3 systems, GTX 1080 card in it now

[@razorsz195]

Would love to get my hands on a 955XE to pop in my dimension 9200. That has a 690GTX, obsolete as soon as iy launched just like the pentium D so, a funny pairing in my eyes but that PC is used for amusing gaming experiences and as a pocket NAS.

[@FullyBuffered]

That sounds like a fun system! At one point I also had a 9200 I believe - love that series of Dell Dimensions...

[@razorsz195]

@@FullyBuffered Was a pc i always wanted as a kid. Waited for the chance to get one free and a friend had one! Though the quirky amd ones do perk my internet..would an X6 work i wonder..But still a fun endevour, though the Q6700 already holds the 690GTX back so..to slap in a pentium D is almost an insult..would keep the temperatures down on it however..

[@camjohnson2004]

The Pentium D was not 2 fused die's but in fact just 2 Intel Pentium 4 CPU's on a single package. Delided Pentium D processors you can see 2 separate silicon dies. These dies had to communicate with each other by sending data and requests from the CPU along the Front side bus to the Memory Controller hub and then back along the FSB resulting in horrible die to die latency. Also the CPU you have is not a Pentium D but actually the Pentium Extreme Edition. These CPU's did not carry the D moniker, since the Pentium D CPU's lacked Hyperthreading. Instead the 955XE and the 965EX were both labelled as Pentium Extreme edition. The Pentium Extreme Edition also came with unlocked multipliers to allow for overclocking without having to raised the FSB.

[@corgiverse9550]

i have one of these but I don't have a *good* board to put it in. The board I thought would work is Core 2 only :( It has a q6600 sitting in it right now xD

[@exvils]

3:53 had one of those, it sadly died after like 6 years

[@Doc_Valparaiso]

Remember when drawing 165 watts was considered extreme for an oc on Intel? ...Pepperidge Farms remembers. - Pepperidge Farms will never forget the 14900KS drawing ~450w (aka RTX 4090 tdp). Pepperidge Farms has either gotten into PC's lately, or companies have gotten into Pepperidge Farms. ...AMD Epyc- Milan/Pepperidge Farms- Milano 🤯

[@TheHangarHobbit]

I had the 805 back in the day, and while those Pentiums were space heaters you could OC the living hell out of those old 805s.

[@FullyBuffered]

They had a lot of potential yeah!

[@Wasmachineman]

wat je ook doet, netburst zal altijd ruk zijn :P t. 4.1 GHz Pentium 3.2E in z'n retro rig (met Aquacomputer waterkoeling niet minder!)

[@FullyBuffered]

Nice, dat klinkt niet verkeerd ;)

[@thelasthallow]

fromy my own personal experiance running a core 2 and core 2 quad on a motherboard that supports DDR3, you can only get the rated 1600MHz with two sticks, if you have 4 the memory controller cant handle it for some reason and only 1333MHz is capable of being ran. re run with two sticks and see what happens.

[@FullyBuffered]

I also suspect running with only 2 sticks would be optimal for overclocking and extra memory speeds

[@Cmdrbzrd]

HE'S ALIVE!

[@AshishKotnala29]

Try windows 7 with this CPU and GTA5. The texture loading issue doesn't happen there. I've personally checked this. Win7 has better CPU scheduler for such old CPUs. And you're right about youtube video decoding. The GPU is carrying it hard there. VP9 decoding is being done by the GPU only. If it were CPU then there would be way too many dropped frames.

[@FullyBuffered]

Interesting, I haven't heard before that the texture issue is not a problem in Windows 7

[@crocodilegamer93]

rockstar killed windows 7 support

[@ssplayer]

Game performance & compatibility will be hampered by the lack of AVX & AVX2 instruction sets on that cpu.

[@technicallyme]

I was excited for pentium d but I remember pentium d based xeon servers slowing down drastically overtime. Far more than any other generation I can remember

[@ruthlessadmin]

Need some AMD benchmarks in there. Hope to see in a future video!

[@FullyBuffered]

AMD chips are on the list!

[@ProAutist101]

Still have an old system from those days. An ASUS WS board with an intel Q6600 had that with 8 gig of OZC ram running at 800mhz but the board was best at the time and DDR3 was way too expensive along with said board. I finally upgraded that to the then relatively new Coffee lake core i3 8350k and an MSI board (1st time not ASUS) which i still currently use but know an upgrade is due.

[@FullyBuffered]

Ah really?!