What is a Pentium 4 capable of in 2016?

[TechGeek]

Re: What is a Pentium 4 capable of in 2016?

I'm going to end this, once and for all. I have an Intel Pentium G3258 CPU on an MSI MS-7850 motherboard equipped with 8GB of DDR3 RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 5850 with 1GB of VRAM. I do video editing and that little CPU can GO! It is kinda slow, though. It has taken literally 18 hours to render a 2 1/4 hour long video at 1080p@60FPS. But other than that, I haven't had excessively long wait times(unless there are a ton of transitions, and/or the video is looong). I also have an older HP computer built in 2010/2011 that has an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU. Perfectly usable. The Pentium G3258 is in my main computer, and that computer does just fine for what I need it to do. So there, that covers the higher-end Pentium(s) and the Intel C2Q CPU.

[momaka]

Re: What is a Pentium 4 capable of in 2016?

I thought this would be a fun experiment. It might just end up being me and momaka trading replies, but all inputs are welcome

Oh man, if only I saw this thread a little earlier... yeah that could have happened. But I guess late is better than never.

I have the highest end P4 made, the 3.73GHz Extreme Edition one with a 1066 FSB.

Nice!

What I wanted to do....was various experiments and see what the highest end P4 is capable of (Starting out with stock speeds) in modern day computing. A CPU that once cost $1000 to own. I have a 120GB Intel 530 series SSD, and a Radeon HD 7950 to ensure that the CPU is the lowest end part of the computer.

I am willing to do video tests, games, internet browsing, Linux/Windows comparisons. Anyone have any suggestions??

Well, I've seen this on YouTube, and was pretty impressed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL2CoYV4mG8

So perhaps try GTA V, if you have it (or torrent it for a test? lol)

Minimum requirements for that game is a Core 2 Quad Q6600 and 4 GB of RAM. That person ran the game with a Pentium 4 630 HT, 2 GB of RAM, and a lowly-low GeForce GT210 . So with the rest of your system being more than adequate, I wonder how well your Pentium Extreme Edition will handle the game.

I'm going to end this, once and for all.

Ha! Not even close, buddy.
The discussion hasn't technically started yet, since I just saw this thread. Better get ready for a wall of text!
(I guess you all know by now how excited I get about old PC hardware.)

But I think this summurizes it all for me:

never underestimate old hardware!

Amen!

also, those of u who think the p4 was poor at everything, i'd like to point out that the p4 did quite well in mpeg2 video+audio recording and encoding. i also use a p4 for htpc purposes and for watching/recording tv. still works great for sdtv and 720p hdtv content. only 1080i hdtv is a drag...

Exactly!
I've been saying this for years now.

Pentium 4 will have no problem with up to 720p (DivX, Xvid, H/X.264) *without* GPU acceleration. With GPU acceleration, you can do 1080p too.

Of course, I'm not talking about YouTube or Netflix here. For YouTube, you can run 480p comfortably on a 2.6 GHz or higher P4 HT *IF* you have an older browser that can do Flash 10.3/11.x. In my experience, Opera 10/11/12 (that is, before Opera switch to Chrome engine) works the best. With a setup like that, you can watch even some "lower-bitrate" 720p videos on YT.

For example, I watched this play-through on 720p, and it never ever lagged for me with Opera 10/12 and Flash 10.3/11.x.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HawhjjF5qFc
(Since I don't have a PS3, and this is a PS3/PS4 only game . F***ing terrific game, though! )

I said to myself, I KNOW this worked before, what has changed? I tried all these tutorials about tweaking VLC settings to make it play better on old hardware. They helped a little but it was always stuttering. Then I thought, ohhhhh I upgraded VLC. So, I went back to my favorite version which is 1.1.11 (July, 2011) That new bullshit version totally ruined everything. I used 1.1.11 with bone stock settings, only upping the network stream cache to 4,000ms, and checking "Enable hardware acceleration (experimental)" and the 1080p (1920x1080) video played flawlessly on a 50" flatscreen. No joke, average 12% CPU usage, never any stutter and flawless playback. Try this version out with an old CPU, I bet you it will work if your GPU supports x264 decoding.

You noticed this too? VLC 1.1.x FTW!!!!

I have VLC 1.1.x on just about every computer and flash drive, "just in case".
And yes, I always check "Use GPU acceleration". Even older GeForce 8400 video cards have pretty good H.264 acceleration and will help tremendously.

That said, there is another trick if you want to run high-bitrate 480p H/X.264 videos on a single Pentium 3 without lag: go to Preferences > Input & Codecs, and set "Skip H.264 in-loop deblocking filter" to ALL. Yes, the video quality will suffer a little, but any videos that previously lagged on the Pentium 3 should now play with some spare 10-15% CPU time.

the point is that if u dont know how to optimise your system and the way the software runs. even an extreme overclock 5ghz cpu is going to be slow...

Exactly!
And I've seen this so much. The worst is when a "professional" IT person forgets to install some hardware drivers (especially the GPU) and the system runs like shit. If I had a coin for every PC I saw like this, I'd be Bill Gates #2 now.

Isn't it sad that yahoo mail and gmail websites load their pages with so much useless crap to slow down web browsing on older machines

Yes, they do. But the good news is there is a very simple workaround for that.

In Gmail, there is a button somewhere (don't ask me where, I forgot) that allows you to switch views. I think it's called "Basic View". It basically runs Gmail in an HTML-only format. And by HTML-only, I mean true old school HTML.

With this setting, you can use Gmail even on a Pentium 3 and it will put absolutely NO TOLL on your CPU/system. Probably even okay on a Pentium II. Only the sign-in page could be a little slower, since it does have some crap on it. But if you use an outdated browser (like I often do), both Yahoo and Gmail sign-in pages will appear extremely basic with nothing but the User Name / Password entries.

That said, Yahoo! Mail has something similar to Google's basic view. You can find it under Options > Advanced Options > Mail Accounts. Switch from "Full featured..." to "Basic", and you will get a version of Yahoo mail that looks much like it did back in 2007 or so. It's a little more laggy than Google's Basic mail view, but still quite usable on a Pentium 3 and 4 CPUs.

I still have some 3.4GHz P4's around somewhere, a lot of modern apps just seem to run poorly on them (though the 1.6GHz Pentium-M and 1.6GHz Atom are worse...though the former is better than the latter)

That's because "modern" apps use Net Lamework, Not-so-Silverlight, Java (no thanks, my computer doesn't like coffee), and other shitty high-level languages made for todays lazy coders.

Honestly, Windows 7 runs pretty well on a P4. It utilizes HT a lot better than XP.

I disagree. At least in my experience, Windows 7 seems much slower on a single-core Pentium 4 (be it with or without HT) than it does on XP.

Take for example my family's PC (which I am about to retire soon): a Dell Dimension 3000. Originally, it came with a 2.8 GHz P4 Prescott (no HT). Ran XP Home for a very long time (from 2006 up until 2013 or so) when my dad accidentally went on virused website. So I pulled the HDD (to keep the old files) and put a new one with Windows 7. Right off the bat, it felt extremely sluggish. Even browsing files on the local drive was slow. So I put in a spare 3 GHz P4 Prescott HT, and that helped quite a bit. But the machine is still quite slow. With XP Home and the original CPU, it never felt like this.

So I reserve Windows 7 only for dual-core CPUs or newer. (And not always too - XP is still better IMO on Netburst CPU and older). Same goes for single-core Athlon/Sempron 64 machines.

Yeah, ever notice how fast one runs after a fresh install? A bloated spinning disk can bring any computer down to a crawl.

Absolutely!
One time a kid in my university thought my Latitude C600 had an SSD in it, because it booted so quickly. I said, "ummm... no. It has a 3400 RPM, 20 GB HDD made more than a decade ago". His reaction :

On my old P4 3.0Ghz system with on board video, I found that playing youtube 360 quality videos was enough to peg the CPU at 100%. While it didn't crash, multitasking was certainly unusable (waiting 10 seconds or more to switch tabs, etc) on Lubuntu.

Ouch.
That sounds like the OS/browser definitely needed more tweaks. I normally run 2 browsers at the same time: typically Opera 10/12 for the basic web tasks (email, YouTube video viewing, etc.) and FireFox 40+ for the majority of browsing. All of that on a 2.8 GHz P4 Prescott HT (32-bit) with 1.25 GB of RAM and onboard Intel 865 graphics.

Opera 10/12 is perfect for websites like badcaps, because of the low CPU and memory usage. I can keep 30+ tabs, and my memory usage stays very modest. For YouTube, Flash 10.3/11.x takes care to keep the CPU usage low. *But*, for browsing video channels on YouTube, I use FireFox, since Opera 10/12 is too outdated to display channel views properly.

The good thing about dual browsers (especially when I'm watching a lot of YouTube videos) is that I can restart one browser *when* its memory usage goes too high. This is one trick to get you around on a PC with "low RAM".

Wow! Usable on a 700MHz P3?

I don't doubt it. XP Pro will run all day happily on that too.

I will check out Vector, sounds interesting. I also have an old Abit board with two Pentium 3 1.40GHz-S CPUs and 4GB of ECC RAM. I may have to run some tests on this as well

Woah, that would make one cool classic rig, for sure. With dual browsers (Opera 10/12) and latests Firefox, plus Flash 10.3/11.x, HOSTS file, and XP Pro (of course!), I think it should be even web-worthy.

Anyways... discussion to be continued. I just hit the 10k word count limit . Seems to happen very often now
Stay tuned for more text.

[momaka]

Re: Pentium4 Story

but there are still millions of old industrial systems out there with p4 in them.and the cpu survives even the loss of the heatsink from busted retainers.only thing that will positively kill one is a vrm short putting +12 on vcore.

Actually, a Pentium 4 can often survive even that. The CPU VRM on the motherboard just needs to be a synchronous buck converter and output-side caps need to be good. If the controller is fast enough, it will catch the short-circuit and close the lower FETs too, thus causing the PSU to go into short-circuit/overload protection.

That said, I had an Intel DG33TL blow 5 MOSFETs on me. 4 times it was on the high side (between 12V line and CPU V_core). For 3 of those, this was while testing with a Pentium 4 CPU.

So Pentium 4 vs. MOSFETs score: 4:0

Don't even get me started on that. They somehow manage to build these aneurism-inducingly-ugly webpages with no visual frills of any kind that take a strong computer just to render and scroll through smoothly.

That's how I feel exactly!
Makes me wonder if there are even any competent web developers these days. Well, I guess there are. After all, the word "developers" fits perfectly: they are still in the learning phase. Hence the half-baked shit that passes as websites these days.

Badcaps.net is just a small cloud of fresh air still left from the old true web.

it should be good,
i have a laptop wih a 1GHz p3 running XP, and a laptop wih a 700MHz p3 running vector-Linux that are both perfectly useable.

Well, as a comparison, my Dell Latitude C600 has a Pentium 3 850 MHz CPU. But I run it underclocked @ 700 MHz so that the cooling fan almost never runs. (takes a good 10-15 minutes of constant CPU load even @ 29°C ambient room temperatures to make it go).

And yes, I still use that laptop today. It's okay for looking up datasheets, checking email (I'll elaborate on that in a second), and Microsoft Office (2003), as well as basic Photoshop (7.0) image editing.

so i added this:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/161186925448

Is that even legit?!
The 256 MB modules in my Latitude C600 have twice the chip count. Samsung modules, too. I wonder if the motherboard in my C600 can take it. Going from 512 MB currently to 1 GB would be nice. It's nearly impossible to browse the web with 512 MB of RAM these days. (Actually, it IS impossible if you are using a modern updated browser.)

I would say using it for some kind of server would be a pretty good idea.

That will work.
Though if you are looking for a simple file server or simple headless torrenting machine, even a Pentium 3 can fit the bill. Of course, if you have multiple Ethernet ports on the motherboard, it's probably better to go with a Pentium 4 (preferably with HT), unless you have a server-grade motherboard. I say this, because I've made comparison tests when transferring files on my network between different computers. The HP Netserver E800 I have was made to be a server/workstation PC, so even when maxing out the 100 Mbps Ethernet port on the motherboard, my CPU load stays fairly low. Same CPU on a different PC (regular desktop), and the CPU use is much higher - close to 70-100% when transferring big files.

I also prefer small tits over large ones, see the resemblance?

I suppose it's a good thing this thread is not in VIP. If it was, I could have uploaded some "nice" pics for you that would have surely converted you views on that matter.
...but this is not VIP. So no titties for you today. Sorry!

ok. I'm done relying (for now).

[yuhong]

Re: Pentium4 Story

Is that even legit?!
The 256 MB modules in my Latitude C600 have twice the chip count. Samsung modules, too. I wonder if the motherboard in my C600 can take it. Going from 512 MB currently to 1 GB would be nice. It's nearly impossible to browse the web with 512 MB of RAM these days. (Actually, it IS impossible if you are using a modern updated browser.)

In this case, it is a dual die package. You should be able to look up the part number on the SO-DIMM. It is not possible to fit more than eight standard 400 mil TSOP chips on a SO-DIMM, hence the DDP and later FBGA and sTSOP. Of course, the mobo must support 256Mbit SDRAM in the first place. A quick check shows a 440BX chipset in the C600, and that chipset can't support 256Mbit SDRAM.

[Behemot]

Re: What is a Pentium 4 capable of in 2016?

Just found out that my dual Pentium III 1 GHz Coppermine server has higher average computing power than this Nortwood at 3.3 GHz in BOINC. That's after about a year of 24/7 run. Yeah Opera usually starts eating quarter to third of the CPU time of the P4 after a while, plus I also work on it couple hours a day. But still, being on par or just slightly better than two Coppermines (with SDRAM PC133 over DDR-440 SDRAM), damn. I should push a fren' to return that Phenom II X2 550 to me so I can unlock it and build a new work rig finally Cause yes, it IS frelling slow to work on the P4!

[eccerr0r]

Re: What is a Pentium 4 capable of in 2016?

Yes a lot of P4s will kill MOSFETs because a lot of "newer" S775 boards were never meant to use P4s and will self-immolate though it may appear to work at first.

I was messing with one of my P4s recently and found that it was actually OK for browsing using chipset graphics...up until I noticed I had adobe crashplayer disabled. When I re-enabled adobe crashplayer, it was sluggish scrolling though it rendered fine.

[momaka]

Re: What is a Pentium 4 capable of in 2016?

Yeah Opera usually starts eating quarter to third of the CPU time of the P4 after a while

That sounds like the "new" Opera engine, based on Chrome/Chromium. If so, then I am not surprised at all. If you have more than 1 GB of RAM, you could try running Firefox, version 42 and up (if you want good compatibility with newer web pages... otherwise Opera 12 will run great).
I don't like Chrome/Chromium at all, so I always try to avoid it when possible.

Yes a lot of P4s will kill MOSFETs because a lot of "newer" S775 boards were never meant to use P4s and will self-immolate though it may appear to work at first.

Well, in my case, the DG33TL board I was using was faulty to begin with. It kept blowing MOSFETs even with a Pentium Dual Core E2180 CPU. Since that's one of the best CPUs I have around here (only 3rd after a C2Q Q6600 and a A64 6000+ X2), I decided that I would test the motherboard with a Pentium 4 CPU as I have a lot of those. That board was never meant to support Pentium 4 CPUs in the first place. But after I finally got it fixed for good (or so, I think), it didn't blow any more MOSFETs even with my Pentium 4 CPU.

I was messing with one of my P4s recently and found that it was actually OK for browsing using chipset graphics...up until I noticed I had adobe crashplayer disabled. When I re-enabled adobe crashplayer, it was sluggish scrolling though it rendered fine.

Interesting.
I think Adobe Flash works better for older CPUs, but scales terribly on newer CPUs and newer browsers.

As such, I configure my systems the following way: if it has a Pentium 4 CPU, then I usually give it Windows XP and Flash as the default player. If it's got a newer CPU, I put Windows 7 and forgo installing Flash altogether (thus only relying on HTML5, which in my experience runs much better on newer CPUs than Flash, but slower on older CPUs).

[Behemot]

Re: What is a Pentium 4 capable of in 2016?

12.18

How can flash work better when it requires instructions those old CPUs don't have?

[momaka]

Re: What is a Pentium 4 capable of in 2016?

12.18

How can flash work better when it requires instructions those old CPUs don't have?

Well, at least Flash 10.3 and early 11 versions do for me. Can't say anything about any of the newer ones. Also forgot to mention that if you have decent hardware capable of H.264 decoding and do a lot of YouTube watching, then you are better off with HTML5, as HTML5 has better overall hardware acceleration than Flash. But if you are relying 100% on CPU for rendering, go for Flash.

Lastly, about the browsers:
While Opera 10/11/12 will run faster for simple pages without much scripts (like Badcaps.net, for example), it will also run much slower on pages with lots of scripts. So for those, you need a somewhat more updated browser like Firefox 42 and newer. Firefox 24 used to be okay, but it seems to be following the same path of the old Opera and other old browsers now: bogged down by heavy scripts and incompatible with web pages.

Anyways, my point is you have to use multiple browsers with such an old PC, and know when/where to use each.