Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

[Per Hansson]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

Amen, brother on all accounts!! PC's today are so boring in comparison to back then!

BTW, I love those water blocks. That radiator looks like a small oil cooler, I bet that worked great with a bank of fans blowing through it!! I really miss those days!

Agreed, I honestly don't remember where that radiator comes from.
One issue in this picture is the radiator is aluminium and my custom blocks are in copper.
Electrolysis occurred and it ate the channels inside the blocks away.
One lesson learned that I remember well to this day!

I also remember I built a custom water block for a friend's AMD Slot A CPU that had cooling for the off-die cache memory too.
It sits at a different height vs the CPU core so it was a bit more complex to manufacture

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

Agreed, I honestly don't remember where that radiator comes from.
One issue in this picture is the radiator is aluminium and my custom blocks are in copper.
Electrolysis occurred and it ate the channels inside the blocks away.
One lesson learned that I remember well to this day!

I also remember I built a custom water block for a friend's AMD Slot A CPU that had cooling for the off-die cache memory too.
It sits at a different height vs the CPU core so it was a bit more complex to manufacture

It looks like an automatic transmission or engine oil cooler to me. Big line throughout the fins versus the smaller passages like a traditional radiator (less likely to clog). I never even thought about electrolysis... I didn't use water in mine, I used GM's new-at-the-time Dexcool. I was doing it baller style man!!

The mailman brought a package from China today, it was the Prescott P4 @ 3.2GHz. Testing it out, and it worked. I'm also testing the keyboard & touchpad out for aother ongoing project.... I got a couple of these in a junk box from someone....the other one works and has already been put back to use. This one has been sitting....but it's time to see what it's all about....and it works like a champ!



Yeah baby!!



Booted from Hiren's XP, life is good!!



I've never tried overclocking a Prescott, or really any P4 for that matter....so I don't know how receptive they are to it....but we'll find out when this one goes together!

[ribcage]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

That's an interesting PC for sure. Am I wrong or is the 6800 Ultra the fastest native AGP card out there, as in without a PCI-E bridge chip? I have never seen a detachable VRM module before. How badly is the motherboard deformed from that Intel's CPU cooler with the two levers?

I have no idea how you pull out those fans from the bearing, that would be interesting to learn. These old P4s can still make a very powerful server, the only issue might be lack of SATA ports, and PCI SATA cards aren't that good from what I've seen. Fabricating missing case covers is something I have to do as well...

[TechGeek]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

That's an interesting PC for sure. Am I wrong or is the 6800 Ultra the fastest native AGP card out there, as in without a PCI-E bridge chip? I have never seen a detachable VRM module before. How badly is the motherboard deformed from that Intel's CPU cooler with the two levers?

I have no idea how you pull out those fans from the bearing, that would be interesting to learn. These old P4s can still make a very powerful server, the only issue might be lack of SATA ports, and PCI SATA cards aren't that good from what I've seen. Fabricating missing case covers is something I have to do as well...

I certainly wouldn't go as far as to call a Pentium 4 the key to a powerful server, or even a powerful anything. My experiences with them have always been that while they can certainly manage loads suited for their time period (or light loads, such as a Syslog or APCUPSD server, or any other kind of light-load network appliance application), they just don't have the horsepower to serve the task of something such as a high-speed firewall appliance or high-capacity fileserver. The IPC and bus bandwidths just aren't there.

My experience with a PCI SATA card (that lives over in the Athlon 64 Retro Gaming System) is pretty good. Plug and play, and it was easy to find the drivers for it, even for Windows 2000 and WinXP x64. Not sure if I've installed the drivers for it on Windows 98SE, but I'd imagine that they wouldn't be too hard to find if I needed to do so.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

If powerful you mean power consuming, sure...

I have a few PCI SATA cards, they seem to work, is there a specific issues you've seen? The ones I have are invariably SATA 1.5Gb and bottlenecked by PCI in general, but it's not much different than using PATA cards on PCI.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

The guy said if I didn't want it, he was going to throw it in a dumpsite on his farm and bury it.

damn! that would be a waste of hundreds of dollars there! all those parts would be worth several hundreds of dollars on junkbay currently!

Motherboard is a Gigabyte P4 Titan submodel GA-8PENXP. This was actually a very high-end gaming board in it's day; sporting the heftier external VRM with fan and the 6 DDR1 slots; albeit 2 on each bank are shared, so it's still obviously only dual channel....but a neat idea for the time.

yea neat idea but i disagree with gigabyte's implementation of it because it splits each slot into two banks so u can only use two single sided 512mb sticks and i dont see how that is different from using a single double sided 1gb stick. it may be an idea to lower the cost of getting the full 3gb of ram addressable because at the time, 1gb sticks commanded a higher premium than two 512mb sticks hence why they did this. but then u have to be careful of what modules u get and use and many high-end ddr memory sticks had heatspreaders so it was impossible to see if u were buying a single sided or double sided stick.

so neat idea but numerous practical issues trying to get the board working properly with all 6 dimms loaded with the right modules it would accept. neat idea but impractical irl.

...but now we come to the true jewel of this thing.....the GPU! an eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra AGP 256mb!! Wow, just wow! All polymer caps too!

yeah nice find! those gf6 gpus are going the way of the voodoo cards. they're worth over 200 bucks on junkbay. pretty soon u'll have a nice retirement fund out of it! haha!

It has 2gb RAM, not a single stick matched and they're the wrong speed (PC2100 & PC2700)....not a single stick of PC3200, which is what it needed....

i think it might be because this was a gaming rig so they thought games would do better with the lower latency of the lower speed modules. could be also that the person building the rig received information that the board would be unstable or wouldnt work with 6 sticks of ddr400 so they got the slower speed modules to ensure compatibility and no funny business would come up when running with all 6 dimms loaded like what u said below in a later post.

The 2 extra RAM slots don't come without a little kryptonite. Even Gigabyte's site warns of this; slowdown in memory speed if the additional channel is used on each bank....so I wanted to see how much..... It drops from 200 to 160 per channel according to memtest....that's pretty significant. I also tested it with 4gb RAM, 2 1gb modules in each bank. POST screen sees 3.3gb.

it could even be that they had a shortage of ddr dimms at the time the system was built so they just used whatever they could find on hand, hence the mismatched speed on the sticks.

Also peeked at the CPU.... A Northwood @ 2.6GHz.... Boggles my mind why they put such a lame CPU and a bunch of slow mis-matched memory in this thing, but such a kick ass GPU....

they probably bought the lower speed cpu with the intention to overclock. the slower cpus tend to overclock more than the faster ones. the northwoods are pretty good overclockers. i also have a p4 ht northwood 2.6 ghz with a stock vcore of 1.525v like yours. i managed to get it to 3.25 ghz (250x13) with a minor vcore increase to 1.55v. its intel linpack and prime95 stable. not bad for a 25% speed increase!

Now for the GPU, which is just as crudded as the motherboard was..... I didn't hotwash it, as it's easier to clean with small brushes & compressed air; far less crevices for shit to live...I really didn't want to wet this if I didn't have to.

Heatsinks removed to reveal the trash thermal paste they used has completely dried out.

nah, i think mine was worse and takes the cake. i bought an xfx 6800 ultra several years ago. when i tested it, the gpu overheated all the way to 99°C while i was testing it in oblivion to see if it was working. it was quite a trooper, not artifacting or crashing in such a graphically stressful game despite the high temps. my guess was that the heatsink was completely clogged and blocked off with dust after all those years.

when i yanked the cooler off, i was right. it was completely blocked off from top to bottom with a giant dust bunny that was over 2cm thick!! not sure if the thermal paste dried up as well. cant remember. it wasnt fun getting that giant dust bunny off and then making sure it didnt fly off somewhere from a sudden wind gust while carrying it to the bin!! mom would have been hopping mad if a foreign giant dust bunny got lost in the house somewhere!! then i'd have two bunnies to deal with! a hopping mad angry mom bunny and a missing foreign giant dust bunny in da house! hot damn!! i dont think i could ever get those illegals to leave if i ever lost them...

I found 4x 512mb OCZ PC3200 DIMMs in the pile, that has it at 2gb running @ full speed; 400MHz interleaved between both channels per bank.

is that the ocz el platinum 512mb pc3200 @ ultra tight 2-3-2-5 timings? those were awesome rams back in the day! due to the lower latency, they were actually better running on amd athlon xp and athlon 64 systems as amd cpus preferred lower latency than high speed.

I found a P4 Prescott 3.2GHz 1M L2! That should do it! I found a couple 3.4's, but priced more than I was willing to spend; cheapest was $100!! I got the 3.2GHz for $22. 200MHz from a netburst CPU will yield very little (if any) improvement, the 3.2 will be plenty!

yea same. i prefer the 3.2 ghz speed cpus solely because of their x16 multiplier. i either ran them at 225x16 to get a nice even speed of 3.6 ghz or 250x16 to get 4 ghz.

Speaking of memory; I tested it today with the OCZ I found. All good!!

yea i noticed it was only running at 2.5-3-2-5. i think it should be able to do 2-3-2-5. u have to set it manually in the bios, i believe. i think the board runs it at cl 2.5 with ddr400 speed when set to auto for stability and compatibility reasons.

I did a quick ebay search for that Zalman cooler....just for grins. None to be found.

aye, i think i can be blamed for hoarding all those zalman gpu coolers. i have several vf700, vf900, vf1000 and gv1000 coolers all for cooling my gpus. sorry for depleting ebay of those... *hides*

as an alternative suggestion to appease thee, i recommend the thermaltake duorb instead. it works well for cooling the 6800 series of gpus also. dont get the arctic nv silencers. they dont work well for cooling the ultras because the ultra stock cooler is dual slot while the gt and lower are single slot, so the end result is that the nv silencer ends up being hotter than the stock cooler on the ultra. other coolers u can look out for are the arctic accelero line of coolers. if it has at least 4 heatpipes, it should work for cooling the 6800 ultra decently.

Speaking of memtest86+ I was staring at my i3-4th gen and it was doing shitty in DRAM speed, was getting like 8GB/sec. My i7-2nd gen is getting 20GB/sec. Though both use DDR3, the i3 has CAS11 units and the i7 has CAS9 - but is the CAS11 actually halving the bandwidth, or perhaps despite saying 128-bit mode it's not really doing dual channel access?

Despite main memory speed, the i3's L1 speed is double the i7's L1 speed and I definitely can feel a bit of difference in single threaded applications, the i3 is indeed a bit faster despite the slightly higher turboboost speed of the i7. Alas if I run four threads, the i7 is way faster...

whats the cpu clockspeed of the i3 and i7? memory bandwidth is also highly dependant on cpu clockspeed so the higher clocked cpu will benefit from faster mhz and lower latency ram. the cpu with more cores will also benefit more as the higher speed and lower latency will decrease access contention to main memory when multiple threads and/or cores try to access memory at the same time.

so the memory bandwidth disparity u are seeing is merely a reflection of the disparity in clockspeed between the two cpus u have. nothing wrong with the ram or the imch (running single or dual channel).

The mailman brought a package from China today, it was the Prescott P4 @ 3.2GHz. Testing it out, and it worked.

I've never tried overclocking a Prescott, or really any P4 for that matter....so I don't know how receptive they are to it....but we'll find out when this one goes together!

nice, i see it seems to be a 1.3v stock vcore part so u may be able to get some overclocking headroom out of it. stock vcores for prescotts are in the 1.2 to 1.4v range. the only p4 prescott i have is a 3 ghz cpu with a high stock vcore of 1.3875v. wont overclock even 5 mhz off the fsb without crapping out in any stress test. bum chip! not overclockable at all to me!

That's an interesting PC for sure. Am I wrong or is the 6800 Ultra the fastest native AGP card out there, as in without a PCI-E bridge chip?

there's also the 6800 ultra extreme but those had a very limited run and practically unobtanium. i only ever saw one ultra extreme on ebay some years ago. it sold for hundreds of dollars.

PCI SATA cards aren't that good from what I've seen.

it all depends on what chipset is on the card. if its a via chipset, those are very wonky and unstable. whats worse, is they are forward incompatible meaning u cant use a faster sata2 or sata3 hard drive on them. they wont detect the drive because they dont recognise the newer and faster standard and hang trying to negotiate the sata link speed. as a result, the faster interface speed hard drive becomes undetectable.

i saw some nec chipset pci sata cards. i think those are better because they are japanese.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

Ok, a little version 2 of the lighting in this PSU.... I wouldn't have normally taken it apart just for this....but I'm working on another one for someone else that's similar to this that has other weird problems beyond capacitors.... I wanted to take some measurements & look at some components....and well, I had the red & blue LED tape; plenty leftover from another project.

Anyway....I removed the white LED's and did a strip of blue and a strip of red down each side where the white was. The output side:



The input side:



Reassembled. This is what you see with a direct view into it, which in even a windowed case you won't get this kind of angle....



This is more along the lines of what you'll see:







Much bolder & better lit for as ricey as this build will be; this is only the beginning!!

[keeney123]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

Classy, nice lights.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

Well, I heisted the Apevia PSU from this build to use in a genuine Apevia case in THIS BUILD....but worry not, I tracked down another one just as goofy; another Apevia I found on ebay. THis one is rated @ 680 watt. I noticed the heatsinks are a little longer and the main transformer is a little bigger (I haven't checked the numbers). Also has lighting that the color can be selected; red, blue, or green....yippie!! It's in fabulous condition, just dirty. It needs a recapping, but I did pretest it, and it works. There was a 'make offer'; and I offered $20....I don't think I've ever had an offer accepted this fast!! I literally hit 'submit', got up to take a leak, and when I got back the offer had been accepted! ...and the shipping was free.





Next is to rework it.

[Dan81]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

Could be a 40 or 42 size transformer (did any manufacturer ever go past 40?) which is rather surprising. Some of Leadman/Sun Pro units also did that from what I recall. Small BJT and standby transformers but the main one was some EI-40 monster (and I have desoldered one to actually confirm this) and the heatsinks were rather thick. Similar in design to momaka's RX-380K but much thicker than his. Oh, and either had
TO-220AB 13009s or D304X.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

This one is rated @ 680 watt. I noticed the heatsinks are a little longer and the main transformer is a little bigger (I haven't checked the numbers). Also has lighting that the color can be selected; red, blue, or green....yippie!!

Well the lighting makes ALL the difference, without that it would be rated for only 180W continuous

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

Well the lighting makes ALL the difference, without that it would be rated for only 180W continuous

It's like a wing on a honda civic....that wing adds atleast 100HP!!

[Dan81]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

Considering most of the parts do look really big (from main caps all the way to the main transformer and output torroid - the last one is a thicc ass boi I see), I would do a recap on the secondary and then have fun with it.

As cute as the yellow caps may look, they're crap at best. Primaries can stay, since Apevia didn't invest in APFC (or even a PFC coil, for that matter.) so even if they're Fuhjyyu or Capxon, those rarely go bad on the primary. 5vSB onwards though, that's where the would start from, at least for me.

[momaka]

Re: Topcat's Ultimate Pentium 4 Retro Gamer!

Apologies in advance for the thread revivals that are to follow. Seems like I've been missing on a few of the retro builds / post around here while gone. Can't allow myself to miss the discussion, though.

Ok, a little version 2 of the lighting in this PSU.... I wouldn't have normally taken it apart just for this....but I'm working on another one for someone else that's similar to this that has other weird problems beyond capacitors.... I wanted to take some measurements & look at some components....and well, I had the red & blue LED tape; plenty leftover from another project.

Anyway....I removed the white LED's and did a strip of blue and a strip of red down each side where the white was..
.
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1653520561

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1653520561

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1653520561

Awesomesauce!

And maybe for the next one (if you find one), do red, blue, AND white LEDs.

but worry not, I tracked down another one just as goofy; another Apevia I found on ebay. THis one is rated @ 680 watt. I noticed the heatsinks are a little longer and the main transformer is a little bigger (I haven't checked the numbers). Also has lighting that the color can be selected; red, blue, or green....yippie!! It's in fabulous condition, just dirty. It needs a recapping, but I did pretest it, and it works. There was a 'make offer'; and I offered $20....I don't think I've ever had an offer accepted this fast!! I literally hit 'submit', got up to take a leak, and when I got back the offer had been accepted! ...and the shipping was free.

I think the one you got was the one I mentioned in post #33 to Tech Geek:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showpo...9&postcount=33

Yeah, the listing probably had an auto-accept set to $20... so it seems you nailed it for the lowest auto-accept price the seller had. That's not bad at all! I think someday these could be highly collectible for anyone doing retro builds. Not many of them floating around due to bad caps... at least until someone finds an old forgotten "gaming" PC in the attic of their house and puts the parts for sale on eBay. In my case, I got the same 680W "ATX-ib680W" model with same selectable tri-color output for the price of....
.
.
$9.40 shipped to my door.

It was dusty, but the caps in it were still good, surprisingly. I pre-emptively recapped it, of course. Just haven't posted it on here. And the pictures have been sitting on my PC since April of 2021!

Could be a 40 or 42 size transformer (did any manufacturer ever go past 40?) which is rather surprising.

44 size on my ATX-ib680W.
And yes, it is a real 44 size: measures 44 mm at the top, as it should.
Apevia didn't do too bad of a job with these PSUs, to be completely honest, at least in terms of component sizing. Where they goofed is the secondary side - extremely cramped and messy. They should have ditched the rear (front, actually) fan and used a bigger PCB... and with proper stand-offs. But apart from that, these are actually solid PSUs.

Some of Leadman/Sun Pro units also did that from what I recall. Small BJT and standby transformers but the main one was some EI-40 monster

Not the ATX-ib680W. Both the driver and 5VSB traffos are proper height and 19 size core.

Oh, and either had TO-220AB 13009s or D304X.

TO-3P parts on both my ATX-ib680W and ATX-As520W. The latter is posted here already if you do a search, but I never finished the recap, if I recall correctly.

Well the lighting makes ALL the difference, without that it would be rated for only 180W continuous

That would be the double and tripple -fan PowMax units with all of the LED fans. I forgot the model on these, but JhonnyGuru had one in a basement roundup review, and the unit did hilariously bad. I don't think it even managed 180W IIRC. It really was BAD.

5vSB onwards though, that's where the would start from, at least for me.

The 5VSB is a must. It's a 2-transistor self-oscillating design, alas without a critical electrolytic cap on the primary. But still, when the 5VSB output caps go, silly things can happen. Here, I had to dig out my ATX-As520W thread to show it:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=65188

Noteworthy is the picture with the bad caps I pulled:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...0&d=1508117050
^ The brown "YC" branded one was actually yellow in a previous life. But this is what happens when the output caps go bad on a self-osc 2-tranny 5VSB - it just keeps working until everything is well-done. Sooner or later, the secondary side driver supply resistor goes too:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...2&d=1508117846