Wonder if Pentium-IV systems will ever be popular again?

[Keatah]

Wonder if Pentium-IV systems will ever be popular among retro-enthusiasts?

 

I asked this question about 486 through Pentium III rigs some odd 10 years ago and got mixed results. In fact I may have gotten more no's then yes. Today Windows98 and the appropriate processors to run the OS are becoming popular among enthusiasts. Vintage DOS and W98 rigs are gaining in popularity!

 

So, today, I ask the same thing about those Pentium-4 NetBurst processors. Will they be nostalgic?

 

---

 

side note: Seems 8086 through 386 didn't make the cut much except among "specialty-enthusiasts". At the height of their nostalgia, they weren't at popular as the 486 through P3 range is becoming. I might also argue, the 486 is almost ready to fall out of favor.

Edited November 11, 2017 by Keatah

[Flojomojo]

I think it would be better for everyone if software support of the old environments continued to improve.

[R.Cade]

They always comes back around to some extent, but some more than others... it's a crap shoot to bet on it.

[eightbit]

I'm sure they will to some people who grew up on them. I personally do not consider the Pentium 4 a "retro" rig. I ran a P4 up until around 2010 and honestly it did not feel better or faster than my previous Pentium III rig. It actually felt slower. Maybe XP and the things I was running at the time consumed more resources than 98/ME/2K and that is why, but things just didn't feel as "powerful" as my PIII rig. Maybe its just me. My personal retro rig cut off is definitely at the PIII.

[Keatah]

I disliked all the heat management issues I had with the P4, unless I spent big bucks on cooling parts and fans and heatsinks I was doomed to have it hot, loud, and heavy. I had a heatsink weighing in at like 3 or 4 pounds of copper. And 3 fans just for the CPU alone. Not to mention 2 for the overheating RAMBUS shit. 1 for the mainboard overall, one in the power supply, and one in the front.

 

I noted the performance of 3.06 GHz was significantly better than 850MHz. But at what cost? I started to lose some legacy support, the ongoing heat and noise.. So no. I disassembled it and reassembled the PIII in the same case. Some year or two later I got a 1.4 GHz and put that in. I was at about 80% performance level, all compatibility was back. Still on the hot-n-loud side, but that's attributed to the graphics card, and 6 drives and other things. The P4 was a stripper, graphics card and soundcard only.

 

The P4 was the most hated processor I think.

Edited November 11, 2017 by Keatah

[SIO2]

Wish I had kept my 486 DX4-100 and my cyrix 6x86mx-pr200 full tower. Oh well. No doubt someone will have similar feelings about their Pentium IV some day.

[+OLD CS1]

I kept a 1GHz Celeron around for "retro" gaming purposes. There is a 486DX4100 floating around here, too, but the 25MHz bus speed lowers performance a little (though not perceptibly in most scenarios.) Then my K6-3+/450. Handy beasts, these.

[Keatah]

Another of the things I didn't like about the Pentium-IV was the cost. And being artificially locked into RAMBUS was another fatal mistake. RAMBUS was/is just another example of IP licensing gone wild. Can you believe they tried to sue every DRAM maker in the industry?

 

I don't know exactly precisely why Intel went with RAMBUS other than streaming memory performance. It was the only memory that would feed the P4 and alleviate the bandwidth bottleneck. IMHO, in retrospect, I'd have delayed the launch of the P4 by a few months and equipped it with standard multi-channel DRAM. I think the P4 would have fared better, sold more, and indirectly provided incentive to get the heat problems under control.

 

I never felt the P4 to be sluggish, then again I had the 2.53 GHz and 3.06 GHz models. Never got around to completing the Northwood 3.4 GHz EE version build out. Cost was just too high to get everything together.

[Cepp]

Too many issues like heat I think and other options are available when it comes to games from that era.

 

I'd rather just buy an Athlon XP personally.

[eightbit]

I am also a big slot 1 fan. I don't know why...maybe because it felt like a cartridge to me I was pretty pissed when they went back to pin socket processors. I think it will be some time before people will consider the P4 collectible or nostalgic. It was just a hot running CPU that didn't deliver like the predecessors or CPUs that came after it.

[Keatah]

Yes. I like the look of the slut one "cartridge". It may have been ho-hum back in the day. But the styling is rather nice and dare I say futuristic. I strongly preferred the S.E.C.C. 1 version compared to the S.E.C.C. 2 version. The SECC2 wasn't completely enclosed and looked half-completed. Some say it was for extra ventilation, I say it was about cost-cutting. Like they stuck a facade, a faceplate, on it. SECC1 is all enclosing and is much more closer to "cartridge" IMHO.

 

I always thought they could do much more with Slot-1, like include the northbridge and southbridge on it.

[eightbit]

I never owned a PIII SECC2 cartridge until recently, and yes, I was pretty upset to see that it was "half a cart" in design. But, after adding the cooler it looks fine. The performance more than makes up for the look

[phoenixdownita]

Yes. I like the look of the slut one "cartridge". It may have been ho-hum back in the day. ......

Please, tell me more, I'm all for a good looking sl.t

[+save2600]

Remember, these are just appliances to most people. Now if the question should be if people want to run PIV era software... that may be a different thing, but they'll have emulation and patches running on systems much smaller, that they won't care. Enter emulation or virtualization advocate Keatah to the rescue! lol

[+OLD CS1]

A lot of boards from the end of the slot era and the rebirth of sockets have bad capacitors. It took until almost 2012 before I could get a board or power supply I could be confident would not pop a cap.

[Keatah]

I even had to replace caps on my slocket.

[JBerel]

I'm gonna guess it all goes by the wayside in favor of virtualization. Stuff like virtualbox can run all sorts of virtual machines on current hardware. Just need to refine the VHD Images for a variety of host environments and you should be able to spin up anything from a prior era. Virtualization is making legacy PC hardware irrelevant cept for the Vodoo & 3DFX stuff.

[+OLD CS1]

DOSbox fills the gaps fairly well when faster hardware is an issue for old software, too.

 

I can tell you, too, Windows 3.11 fricken FLIES under virtualization

[zzip]

Wonder if Pentium-IV systems will ever be popular among retro-enthusiasts?

 

I asked this question about 486 through Pentium III rigs some odd 10 years ago and got mixed results. In fact I may have gotten more no's then yes. Today Windows98 and the appropriate processors to run the OS are becoming popular among enthusiasts. Vintage DOS and W98 rigs are gaining in popularity!

 

So, today, I ask the same thing about those Pentium-4 NetBurst processors. Will they be nostalgic?

 

---

 

side note: Seems 8086 through 386 didn't make the cut much except among "specialty-enthusiasts". At the height of their nostalgia, they weren't at popular as the 486 through P3 range is becoming. I might also argue, the 486 is almost ready to fall out of favor.

 

Hmm... time to list my old 486 on ebay

[zzip]

I'm gonna guess it all goes by the wayside in favor of virtualization. Stuff like virtualbox can run all sorts of virtual machines on current hardware. Just need to refine the VHD Images for a variety of host environments and you should be able to spin up anything from a prior era. Virtualization is making legacy PC hardware irrelevant cept for the Vodoo & 3DFX stuff.

 

Some people prefer real hardware. Fine with me. I can virtualize my old stuff and sell my old hardware to someone who will actually use it. Win/win

[Keatah]

One of the many reasons the Pentium IV design sucked is because those marketing drones kept changing the design requirements and they tried to appeal to mobile, server, and desktop all at once to make matters that much worse.

 

And as they made these changes, they forced answers from the project lead without really letting the design team work them through. All the little changes being made on a weekly-meeting-basis, were innocuous in and of themselves, but, they interacted in less than desirable ways. That's once of the reasons for having such a long pipeline and having to double-clock the integer units to reach PIII-equivalent output.

Edited November 15, 2017 by Keatah

[Flojomojo]

Riddle me this

 

Are the Celeron and Pentium systems being sold today just cut-down versions of modern chips, built-up evolutions of the old chips, or something else (just branding)?

 

I realize all Intel stuff is iterative and all the new stuff builds on the old, but it's funny to me that they keep the old Pentium name alive.

[+OLD CS1]

Modern Pentium and Celerons have less cache than Core CPUs, lack turbo clock rates, and have lesser GPUs with lower GPU clock rates, though there is some over-lap in functionality between the Pentium and the Core-i3. You can think of the Pentium as a lower-end i3 and the Celeron as the lower-end Pentium: the Pentium, like the i3, supports four threads per core while the Celeron runs two threads per core.

 

My guess is the only reason Intel drags either along still is to meet price-point expectations. I have not looked at the price differences between Pentiums and Core-i3s as I will not sell anything built with less than an i3 so I cannot be certain. I generally try to stay i5 and above as the wholesale price difference between an i3 and i5 runs between $75 and $150, depending upon generation.

[zzip]

Riddle me this

 

Are the Celeron and Pentium systems being sold today just cut-down versions of modern chips, built-up evolutions of the old chips, or something else (just branding)?

 

I realize all Intel stuff is iterative and all the new stuff builds on the old, but it's funny to me that they keep the old Pentium name alive.

 

Lol, yes! I don't find the CPU naming schemes at all intuitive, especially Intel's

 

I don't follow it regularly, and everytime I go shopping for PC upgrades I get a headache trying to decipher it all.

[Flojomojo]

Modern Pentium and Celerons have less cache than Core CPUs, lack turbo clock rates, and have lesser GPUs with lower GPU clock rates, though there is some over-lap in functionality between the Pentium and the Core-i3. You can think of the Pentium as a lower-end i3 and the Celeron as the lower-end Pentium: the Pentium, like the i3, supports four threads per core while the Celeron runs two threads per core.

 

My guess is the only reason Intel drags either along still is to meet price-point expectations. I have not looked at the price differences between Pentiums and Core-i3s as I will not sell anything built with less than an i3 so I cannot be certain. I generally try to stay i5 and above as the wholesale price difference between an i3 and i5 runs between $75 and $150, depending upon generation.

 

That's a good explanation. I had to explain to my boss the difference between i3, i5, i7 vs the "generations" (hidden in the model number) and the clock speeds (which are not apples-to-apples if you're not comparing within the same family).

 

zip: CPUBoss is my favorite. The names and numbers mean less than the testing results.

 

I miss the Windows Experience Score!