Discussion Have You Ever Owned a Pentium 4?

[jnjnilson6]

I've owned a Pentium 4 520J (clocked at 2.8 GHz, HT enabled, 1MB L2 Cache, NX bit), a large number of Pentium 4 520s and a P4 @ 2.66 GHz. The wonderful futuristic startup screen with the brassy logo, the high amount of MHz for the time which'd always seemed futuristic and exhilarating, the fast speeds while running most software... Those were the times!

So have you had one yourself and if so, what were your impressions? (Sitting up in a high room in the night and devoting oneself to the unique and power-inducing experience of working on one of these babies!)

Thank you for writing up!

 

[Inthrutheoutdoor]

Been there, done that, many times over !

They were ok for their time, but not overly exciting IMHO

 

[jnjnilson6]

Been there, done that, many times over !

They were ok for their time, but not overly exciting IMHO

They were in the 256 MB to 2 GB RAM era. We may say they were at their peak in the 1 GB RAM period (2005-2006), underlining graciously the beginning of another chapter in the Big Book of Hardware. They seemed so fast though; I guess partially because software was much better written than it is today. Their generation was the first and last time when we've felt most thoroughly on the verge of a revelation, a revelation of novelty and the crest of numerical avidness; we felt that this was a big step ahead; a newness comparable to the remorseless pathways of data brimming within those (for their time) immeasurable frequencies; they worked on the mind like no other technology or architecture ever afterward... Skipping through the ghostly numbers and setting in for the comfortableness of Hyper-Threading to spark in more performance, rendering software within a half-breath, enjoying the digital world in fullness and apt perspective... It was all so far away and yet so memorable and remarkable; breathless ventures of the memory and incalculable glories of nightly perambulations in the computer world under that scuffed and vaguer sticker - the P4.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Not pentium 4. I was in the opposite camp with the good old athlon xp chips.

 

[JWNoctis]

Had one in a prebuilt, mid 2005, LGA775 Prescott, 2.93GHz and 1M L2 cache without hyperthreading. Did not feel slow at all at the time on Windows XP, though the rest of the system left a lot to be desired with a no-name GeForce FX 5200 and maybe 1GB DDR, 333 or 400, forgot which. Did 30fps at the best of times when Minecraft was new, with block render distance set to 4, maybe a bit more, but certainly less than 8. Upgraded the system 3 years later with a beefier CPU cooler when heat pipe was cool and new, a new PSU, more memory, a single LED case fan, and a Radeon HD 3650, AGP version, that appeared to turn out to be a remarked HD 2600 later, though I couldn't actually seem to remember playing much game on that after that upgrade. Never got warmer than 50 degC after the upgrade either, though I couldn't actually seem to remember whether that's true core temperature or not.

Think I still have it somewhere, on display together with the processor of the system that replaced it, a socket P Penryn-era Core 2 laptop chip, though that system did not last half as long as the desktop did in the end.

 

[Dragos Manea]

OMG, memories, i got my first PC with the first generation of P4, 1.6 GHz socket 478 then after 3 years i swaped with a 3 ghz prescott on socket 478. My next upgrade was i3 2120 with a gtx 560. Good memories.

 

[DSzymborski]

The Pentium 4 was always a bit bittersweet to me. I still have one -- that old PC drives my stereo has a Northwood Pentium 4 -- but this was the last hurrah of the Pentium as Intel's flagship chip.

 

[Nighthawk117]

I had a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz Prescott, I remember using it to play GTA SA back in the day. Performance was fine but eventually swapped it out for a Athlon 64 3800+ because it was difficult to cool.

 

[iTRiP]

I'd always tried to stay up-to-date with my pc build, witch was at that point around 2001, sure I had my self an intel P4 built, (Didn't have the time then to build myself) It was a 2.0Ghz model, surely the fastest as I could afford...later I upgraded the GPU to an Geforce 4 Ti and upgraded the ram to 2GB of 512mb sticks, haha remember spending an entire month's salary just on ram, playing games such as NFS and GTA all on the highest settings on 800x600x32 100Hz just about the time that the gaming community started using apps to monitor fps whilst playing!

If I'm accurate best PSU one could get at that time was a 400Watt unit to power the beast of a machine at the time, rocking all the DVD rw's, and compared to todate's standards many mechanical drives and everything that is built in too the motherboards now days ie: sound cards, tv cards, network adaptors and such.

 

[Karadjgne]

P4 3.4GHz. In a Dell 8400 (shhh, I know, but it was almost free). I actually had no cooling issues with it, the heatsink was seriously beefy, all I did was slap a better fan on it and the factory shoud meant all that heat was exhausted directly out of the case (fan did double duty, updraft and exhaust). Paired with an x800 pro that was blower type meant almost no case heat other than motherboard components. But with a top mounted, fan down psu, that was no issue either.

Overall, one of Dell's most successful thermal pc's, on such a hot running cpu, and then it went downhill, quick fast and in a hurry.

 

[alceryes]

I had the 'fixed' Pentium 4 (Northwood) 1.6GHz. Ran it at between 2.6-2.8GHz (depending on room temp). Just before this I was running an Athlon Thunderbird slot A.

The original Pentium 4 (Williamette) was a complete joke. It couldn't compete with Intel's current Pentium IIIs, nor the Athlon Thunderbird, in anything but a few select benchmarks that showed off the expensive (but fast) RDRAM. They also ran insanely hot. Mfgs. had a hard time keeping the temps in check while keeping the dBs down.

 

[lordmogul]

have owned?
I still have both. The 2.66 GHz Prescott and the 3.0 GHz Cedar Mill with HT. But both are slower than my Celeron 440.

 

[jnjnilson6]

have owned?
I still have both. The 2.66 GHz Prescott and the 3.0 GHz Cedar Mill with HT. But both are slower than my Celeron 440.

Within the sphere of assorted CPUs, variable frequencies and architectures, it would presumably be a worthy thing to note that similarly with you, I've owned a Celeron 420. It was a good CPU and it overclocked from 1.6 GHz to 3.0 GHz fluently and efficaciously, offsetting the performance of the Pentium 4 520 (HT @ 2.8 GHz) to an expletive degree, which reversing the process and leaving the 420 without an overclock would have marked out a win for the Pentium.

Well, I do still have the processors somewhere. I had acquired many a P4 520 from Ebay about 10 years ago, however the boxes and the systems to which I've installed any P4 520s have long since said their final farewell to any practically practicable endurance and obsolescent retainment.

It is a wonderful and vivacious little world, that of the Pentium 4s. You remember about long and languorous blue taskbars, the lazy indifference of many hours marveling at that screen, Windows XP's screen, and feeling a type of inane superiority by reading off and delighting in the heightened frequency numeral marking the speed of the Processor, namely the Pentium 4's greatest appeal regarding consumer attention and unequalled pique; soft music lingering fainty in the ear, from either Media Player or YouTube, and multitasking, in its initially widened and glamorous stages concerning the mind in the odd hours of the night; where the cadence of the machine becomes swifter only in ranges, the appreciation of faster hardware dawning with each quota of memory spent irregardlessly toward some unparticular goal, making these starry experiences engulf us and the Pentium 4 generation many years after its practical deployment and coveted speed have failed to captivate us.

Long sentences, but it's somehow irretrievable I should picture lone basketballs thrown upward toward fluorescent hoops in darkened halls and Pentium 4 machines clicking above endlessly into the night, as magical as it would ever be, drawing the mind to cool and invigorating contemplations, casting off the hidden glamor of a glance or the hidden glamor of computing avidness within such memories that only night time or a long walk or a continuous portion of reminiscence may bring... It's all so hoary and obsolescent, yet I wish I could continually be borne along such memories and back, further into those rocky days of hardware, a consummation like a vivid dream.