OldSchoolRetroGamer Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 (edited) Looking for thoughts, suggestions, comments etc. Now, to be clear, I have a perfectly serviceable desktop and laptop for normal daily uses. However I am a collector and one who likes to tinker with older computers and consoles. Recently I have acquired 2 Pentium 4 desktops. Both work so far. With what I had salvaged from various sources the end results are: Computer 1: IBM Thinkcentre with 1gb ram (sharing a bit with inboard graphics) Boot drive: 40GB SSD. DVD Rom Drive. Computer 2: Generic in standard midtower case. 1.5GB ram also sharing a wee bit for inboard graphics) DVD Rom Drive. 250GB Hard Drive. I was getting scrambled garbage output on the display initially so I decided just to try removing all the ram and re-seating them one at a time and rebooting, fortunately by the end I had all four sticks reinserted and the display was fine. Now currently I have WinXP on the Thinkcentre and just for laughs to see what it would be like Win7 on the Generic PC. This was merely to make sure everything was working and to see if specs were reading right etc. I am willing to change Operating Systems as I already made an image of the base installs so I am happy to tinker with any OS. Obviously, neither may be the most useful for modern tasks and I gave better machines for that. I never owned Pentium 4 machines before, one thing so far, on both machines the CPU fans seem to go into fits sounding like jet engines at times lol. Is this normal? Do they run so hot as to require such high speed rotating fans? Otherwise everything seems A-ok. Other then that, would love your ideas on things that might be fun to try or perhaps recommended uses or things to try in general. Any with experience with Pentium 4 machines I would appreciate helpful suggestions / tips as well. THANKS all in advance, looking forward to your input! Edited July 6, 2014 by OldSchoolRetroGamer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobertLM78 Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 Out of curiosity, are the chips hyper-threaded? I have a hyper-threaded P4 with Linux Mint 13, MATE with 1 GB RAM and a simple discrete GPU card. It can handle 'modern' tasks, but not nearly as quickly as my 'new' i5 machine. It can run Oolite, with just about all the detail of my i5, and it runs MESS O.K., VICE a little better. It's a fun machine though, and I think Mint really helps breathe some new life into it, too . 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OldSchoolRetroGamer Posted July 6, 2014 Author Share Posted July 6, 2014 Out of curiosity, are the chips hyper-threaded? I have a hyper-threaded P4 with Linux Mint 13, MATE with 1 GB RAM and a simple discrete GPU card. It can handle 'modern' tasks, but not nearly as quickly as my 'new' i5 machine. It can run Oolite, with just about all the detail of my i5, and it runs MESS O.K., VICE a little better. It's a fun machine though, and I think Mint really helps breathe some new life into it, too .. Yes I believe both have hyper. Threading capabilities. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 (edited) Pentium 4 is a pretty broad description since they made them for so long and had 3 socket form-factors. The early ones are barely worth a pinch of shit, the Athlon XP of the time generally wiped the floor with them, and RDRam motherboards aren't exactly desirable. The Socket 478 ones are worthwhile if the P4 itself is >= 2.8 GHz speed. The LGA775 were the last/best - if the motherboard is a later one that supports the Core2 CPU then there's an easy upgrade path. Any half serious machine running WinXP, you really want at least 2 Gig of RAM - but if it's just to serve as an emulation/HTPC box then 1 Gig or even 512 Meg would be OK. But the thing is, these things are so common that they're practically throwaway items. I'd not worry too much about Hyperthreading. They actually discontinued it for a time. Real multicore of course is much better. Edited July 6, 2014 by Rybags 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kapikui Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 You could easily put Debian Linux or similar (some of the more mainstream distros are gui heavy and can't run on light hardware), on one and run as a file server or some other server. Don't put on a GUI, and run it headless. You can access it through ssh. I had one running on a Pentium III until it died completely, and I haven't gotten around to rebuilding it yet. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaybird3rd Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 I have an old Pentium 4 (a 2.8GHz Northwood) with 3GB of RAM, running FreeBSD, that I've been using as a network server for a few years. It hosts shared files, a database, a Web server, and a few other services on my home network. I've kept it partly because the motherboard has PCI-X slots, and I had a 12-port 3Ware PCI-X SATA2 RAID card that I wanted to use. It's been a solid machine, though it does run a bit hot, but that's probably because I've got seven hard drives in it right now. I'll be rebuilding it later this summer with a lower number of larger drives. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
20ohm20 Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 Until very recently, I used a 1.9Ghz P4 with 1.5GB of RAM and 60GB IDE hard drive in my MAME cabinet. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tickled_Pink Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 The best machine I ever built (probably) was a P4 on a pretty cheap 775 ECS motherboard (Intel 915 chipset). It was absolutely bullet proof. It only had an AMD X300 graphics card but could run Sims 2 just fine. So that gives some idea of what it could do performance-wise. Motherboard failed about a year ago after about 8 years use. I have some old systems, cpus and boards in the garage that are about the same age or even older. My plan is to put them into MAME machines. Just need to finish clearing out some space. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Algus Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 Integrated video was really bad in this area of computing so they wouldn't even perform particularly well as XP era gaming machines, although I kept my P4 tower around in the Vista years for compatibility with Infinity Engine games. Fortunately Windows 7+ support for classic software has been very good so this isn't really necessary anymore. A P4 and a gig or two of RAM probably still has enough processing power to be used for daily tasks on a lightweight OS. I used my P4 laptop through 2008 and it was quite servicable after I replaced XP with Ubuntu. Both of those systems have a good amount of RAM compared to my P4 systems, which both packed 512 MB so my guess is they're newer and probably adequate as is for modern office work and web browsing. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andromeda Stardust Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 I built two of them back in the day with cheap ass 2.4Ghz Celeron processors (socket 478). The processors were pieces of dog doo but I managed to overclock them at 3.2Ghz. The multiplier was locked but I raised the system bus from 100Mhz to 133Mhz. The DDR RAM was rated 400Mhz and crashed at the resultant 533Mhz (duh!) but I changed the RAM multiplier from 4x to 3x and the system ran stables as a rock with the Celeron clocked at 3.2Ghz. Performance still sucked ass. My Athlon 3000XP at 2133Mhz with 333DDR wiped the floor with the OC 3.2Ghz Celeron performance wise and cost about the same. I've been in the AMD camp ever since... My current rig is an overclocked AMD FX2 (8- core Bulldozer, Black Edition, stock 3.6Ghz) with giant-ass heatsink running at a rock solid 4.2Ghz. I've ran Fractal renders for weeks at this setting. System pulls ~90 watts at the power socket idle (CPU @33C) about ~250 watts 100% doing 64-bit integer multplication rendering deep Mandelbrot zooms on all 8 cores (CPU @62C), up to ~320 watts using a "Burn in" type CPU stress test (CPU @74C). Temps drop ~20C almost instantly when the CPU goes idle so the cooling system is doing it's job. Thermal speed regulation yields minimum noise idle vs maximum performance when needed. I have thermal shutdown set to 80C in case something goes wrong with the cooling fans. So far so good. All in all not bad getting over 200w of headroom from a 125w rated CPU... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 A boat anchor? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+save2600 Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 Or an obnoxiously large door stop. For a few winter seasons, I kept an old Dell server in the back of my car for weight. ...hey, he did ask for 'any' comments! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Tomlin Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 Pentium 4? Space heater, definitely. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickR Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 You could load all your Atari 8-bit atr files and use it as a host for SIO2PC. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mipaol Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 What would I do with a Pentium 4 computer in 2014, install GNU/Linux on it of course. It never ceases to amaze me how capable old computers become when you ditch Windows and install a lightweight GNU/Linux distro. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John_L Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 I actually had a pentium 4 LGA775 hyperthreaded 3.6 Ghz machine with 4 gigs of RAM (well, XP saw 3 and some change), and an NVidia GTX 570 until less than a year ago. I've since upgraded to an i5 4 core, 3470 3.2 (turbo's to 3.6 though) with 32 Gigs of RAM and a 256 Gig solid state HD and a 3TB regular HD. There's probably quite a bit you could do... you could get some USB cameras and turn the PC into the hub the cameras go to and have a multi-cam security cam setup, or you could turn one into a media center networked to your current pc and/or TV, etc... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
almightytodd Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 Well, here's what I use my Pentium 4 desktop computer for... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OldSchoolRetroGamer Posted July 6, 2014 Author Share Posted July 6, 2014 (edited) Thanks to all thus far for the serious , helpful, useful suggestions. Much to consider, having fun learning and trying things. @Rybags, I believe at least one is a "Prescott" Pentium 4? I will try to got more detailed info when I have some time. Edited July 6, 2014 by OldSchoolRetroGamer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Target practice? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Gemintronic Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Well, you could make it a Tor proxy. After all, if you visit cetain sites you are targeted for extra spying http://boingboing.net/2014/07/03/if-you-read-boing-boing-the-n.html Could use it to mine cryptocurrencies At least use it as a file server or SQL server 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DesertJets Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 I was going to say boat anchor or doorstop as well. But more seriously do you know some folks that need a basic and cheap computer? I know the P4 is SEVERAL generations removed from currentish gen processors, but could you do a trim install of Win7 and shove as much RAM as possible into it so some older person can have a basic internet appliance? Other idea would be to set it up as a retro-ish gaming box, though getting a separate GPU would be a priority. I had an early P4 based Celeron machine in the mid 00s that had on board graphics. With only 512mb RAM the GPU could pull up to 128mb, which didn't really do anything any favors. I could play SimCity4 but with the settings at their lowest level. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 One could always donate it to the IRS as a backup device! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatta Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Space heater. P4s are terrible, they're too modern to have retro appeal (no ISA slots, etc) and too old to do anything useful with. Everything a P4 can do, a Core chip can do better, faster, and more efficient, and just as cheaply second hand. It's a crap architecture too, yeah it gets high GHZ, but is outperformed per watt by the P3 and per cycle by the Athlon XP. A lot of people would say "har har, that old IBM XT is a boat anchor", but no there's really interesting and fun stuff you can do with it. Not so with P4s. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OldSchoolRetroGamer Posted July 7, 2014 Author Share Posted July 7, 2014 (edited) Currently enjoying Lubuntu and may try Linux Mint later, found a good old Nvidia 7200 gs to stick in one! Two those suggesting donate, give away etc, don't know how to make clearer, I like to tinker and play with old tech especially one I did not have before, it is not about how useful or if I have something better (I do lol) but I am keeping them just to tinker with, such is my hobby and past time. So anymore silly suggestions ( looking at you --- Ω --- ) are ignored. Anyhow, very impressed with how well Lubuntu is running (though I am sure the SSD, 1.5GB ram don't hurt) , I image my OS within minutes so I have fun just testing different ones just to see. So far oddly my personal WinXP installs did not recognize all drivers and trying to find them proved futile (even though they both have a MADE FOR WINDOWS XP LABEL) but Win 7 which I originally installed more as a joke, well all drivers were recognized and installed first time and it worked far better then I expected with these specifications. Currently Lubuntu running great but it is new to me so will take some getting use to. Edited July 7, 2014 by OldSchoolRetroGamer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 (edited) even when service pack 3 came out first second model p4's were still fresh on the market, its no wonder why none of the devices are recognized, just cause it has a XP sticker on it doesnt mean the drivers are going to be on the XP disc. I dont consider P4's old tech, I was chained to one at work as late as 2011, its a winders box, saying it runs current os's good is like being suprised your 2006 car has a cd player heh anyway have fun with the boat anchor Edited July 7, 2014 by Osgeld 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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