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Pentium 4

I had actually bought a P3 off eBay a few weeks ago, they sent me a dead P4, I had to return it. Wouldn't have kept it if it had worked. So for me, this conversation is over, when they start going sideways, you know its time to move to a different topic. No P4 for me. Thanks for the Good, Bad and Ugly on P4's. Never had one, never will!
 
GiGaBiTe said:
The 386 to 486 transition isn't really comparable to the Pentium 4 to Core 2 transition. Back in the 80s and early 90s, computers were orders of magnitude more expensive, people bought a 386 because they simply couldn't afford a 486. In the late Pentium 4 and early Core 2 era, that was not even remotely the case. Newer Core 2 chips were being sold for the same or lower than the Pentium 4 that came before them.
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I dont think that you can use that blanket statement to explain computer purchasing at the time. My buddy was the first to buy a brand new 386 from the gateway 2000 catalog when I was still rocking my IBM 5160 and would continue to until I bought a 486DX4 PC Clone,.

I dont think people with 386's were buying 486's as some natural progression. People kept machines much longer back then. I know people using 386's into the late 90s. And I met plenty of middle aged people around 2000 who still never owned a computer.
 
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EverStaR said:
It doesn't exist, its a hypothetical. but if you think about it, if it had a nice case, nice video card, nice sound card, nice amount of memory, fast P4. The parts would almost be worth $200, IE the P4 MB would practically be free. So you have people here split, some have and like them a lot, and others who think they are worthless and trash. The Hypothetical was presented to see how the value or lack of value conversation played out. Looks like worthless is winning. Looking at SOLD on ebay shows prices of anywhere from $19 to $300, the majority on the lower end.
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Oh definitely.

I bought a PC in a thrift store the other day for $10 not tested, because I knew even if no part of it worked the case alone was worth way more than ten bucks to me. If you DID spend $200 on a full standard ATX tower full of parts yeah, that's not a bad deal, so long as shipping is included :p

I think a big problem on here is people are too caught up with the fact that the P4 is a terrible processor. It is. But all of the OTHER things equipment from the P4 era offers have value on their own. AGP support, PCI support, sometimes even ISA. Often a cool mix of IDE and SATA support but with Floppy controllers too. The Being a good platform to dual-boot XP and '98(which only later P3s are very effective for).

I'm not saying anyone should ever buy a P4 over a P3 or instead of a P3. More like if you can't afford a good P3 and want to retro game, or you already have a good P3 and want something new to screw around with. Those are the niches the P4 occupies.
 
Terrible processor, terrible era in computing quality. Capacitor plague.


Noone should reminisce about the medieval dark ages. "Remember when everyone we knew died of the black death and noone was literate and we all lived to be 36?.. Good times"

1.)Birth of widescale throw away technology and planned obsolescence.
2.) capacitor plague
3.)everything in flimsy fragile plastic (yes Im talking about all computers of the era,. Apple g3 and g4 too)
4.) race to the bottom for absolute crap computers causing even things at the top end to be affected
5.) Death of the absolute zenith pf CRT tv's and monitors for by comparison mediocre lcd panels.
6.)the dawn of the forced updates, forced subscription, popups annoying messages from OS or programs. And games,software with a time bomb as they require a web connection to run and then are randomly taken offline nullifying the software entirely.
7)The death of owning software.

Why even waste time on this? Maybe you just too young to remember when things were better (or werent even around).

Reminisce for Wood and steel construction. Higher price tag of yesteryear generally reflected in the quality.

It is a shit cpu.. But thats far from the only reason this time of computing should not be remembered fondly.

This era is the start of the reason why I HATE modern computing and dont care about it anymore. I dont buy modern hardware, I dont use modern OS's (sans linux), and I just distance myself from all the current trends..

Im NOT NOSTALGIC FOR WINDOWS XP! It was all bloatware least you forget.

Its just soul crushing madness... And you all seem to line up smiling to drink the kool-aide.. Good job. Burn it all to the ground.
 
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VERAULT said:
And whats all this nonsense about win98 on a P4.. no p4s came with windows 98 .. am i missing something in this group delusion?
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At $dayjob the first P4 here, a Dell Dimension 8100, came with Win98SE installed from Dell (it was ordered that way; Windows ME was, well, ME, and while NT 4 and Windows 2000 were both options, Windows XP hadn't yet been released). You can still download drivers for Windows 98 for that box. It was a 1.4GHz Socket 423 with Rambus RDRAM. The system is still here somewheres.
 
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lowen said:
At $dayjob the first P4 here, a Dell Dimension 8100, came with Win98SE installed from Dell. You can still download drivers for Windows 98 for that box. It was a 1.4GHz Socket 423 with Rambus RDRAM. The system is still here somewheres.
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I worked for Dell at the time. I remember those RDRAM machines. They may have had drivers on the website but those machines shipped with Windows 2000. I have never seen a single one ship out with windows 98. Possibly millennium but I have no recollection on ME and those machines.
 
I'll have to peek at my IBM Netvista A30 to see if it has a Win98 sticker on it. Terrible machine--slower than a contemporaneous P3 system. SDRAM. Motherboard has been exchanged for an AM3+ board.
 
Looking at Maximum PC Sep 2002, I see a number of systems offered with Win98SE or WinMe with a free upgrade to XP Home. 256 MB of RAM means those would be more useful when running 98SE. I think it was 2004 when XP became the default OS for new gaming systems.
 
What Verault said up in #47 is spot on. If you are a collector and want to build or need a P4, sure why not? But, if you plan to do some gaming or run some apps just this side a being a daily driver, then you will soon discover what every P4 owner knows; it's fairly fast for its time, it's hot, very hot, and like it or not, the dual core is way better for that time period.
 
Agent Orange said:
What Verault said up in #47 is spot on. If you are a collector and want to build or need a P4, sure why not? But, if you plan to do some gaming or run some apps just this side a being a daily driver, then you will soon discover what every P4 owner knows; it's fairly fast for its time, it's hot, very hot, and like it or not, the dual core is way better for that time period.
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I do remember now vaguely about the discussions on heat, probably why I avoided them back in that time.
 
It's very interesting how P4 is highly disregard by a lot of people, and I agree with every argument about it. But, here in Brasil a P4 has more collecting value than a P1 or P2, outrageous right? I could sell a P4 423 RDRAM kit for $ 250 USD and people will go nuts about it. Just a MB, CPU and RAM, nothing else. Maybe those ebay sells are international. What is very hot around here is a dual boot W98 and XP P4 machine. I found this terrible, but the people loves it. It was for a lot of people, their first computer. I never owned a P4 back then, always preferred the AMD solutions for the time.
 
VERAULT said:
I worked for Dell at the time. I remember those RDRAM machines. They may have had drivers on the website but those machines shipped with Windows 2000. I have never seen a single one ship out with windows 98. Possibly millennium but I have no recollection on ME and those machines.
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Like I said, this machine was specifically ordered with Windows 98SE. It was eventually upgraded to XP, shortly before being decommissioned.

EDIT: Well, couldn't find it, but found a slightly newer 4300 in our donated machines, with a Windows ME sticker on the side... so ME was an option. Found a bunch of 'n' series GX400's, though. Sounds like that 8100 could be a unicorn; with you working for Dell at the time I'll take your word for it, but I also know what I saw.

As far as I cant tell it was ordered that way so that the two accounting PCs would match exactly as far as software was concerned; one was an older Pentium III Dimension with Windows 98, and the Technical Director at the time had a bit of a vendetta against NT and derivatives, including 2000. So I don't know how he did it, but he got an 8100 with 98 loaded.
 
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lucasdaytona said:
It's very interesting how P4 is highly disregard by a lot of people, and I agree with every argument about it. But, here in Brasil a P4 has more collecting value than a P1 or P2, outrageous right? I could sell a P4 423 RDRAM kit for $ 250 USD and people will go nuts about it. Just a MB, CPU and RAM, nothing else. Maybe those ebay sells are international. What is very hot around here is a dual boot W98 and XP P4 machine. I found this terrible, but the people loves it. It was for a lot of people, their first computer. I never owned a P4 back then, always preferred the AMD solutions for the time.
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That's quite interesting - up here in the US of A you can pretty easily pick up a P4 423 kit for $30-40 USD. Mayhaps we need to go into business? :p
 
I don't have an RDRAM machine, my P4's are SDRAM or DDR. I can see the collectors value because it was a dead-end system with exotic RAM that never caught on.

I can also see people who don't want a bunch of PCs in their house picking one that best spans the era of gaming they like, and 98/XP spans a very big era of gaming.

There have been milestones in computer history that expanded home use of machines. 8-bit systems like C64/Atari 800 got computers into the house and that expanded with the Amiga and cheap XT clones for people who did more then game and wanted to do some work at home. DOOM is probably responsible for everyone I knew who didnt have a computer to get a 486. Quake got people to invest in networking in the home and in the late 90's price drops and the Internet got the masses into needing a computer at home and sales exploded while prices dropped. The P4 era was when computers became a commodity and build quality did suffer. Right after that the core i3/5/7 came out with built in video and computers were just a board with some storage attached.
 
VERAULT said:
I dont think that you can use that blanket statement to explain computer purchasing at the time. My buddy was the first to buy a brand new 386 from the gateway 2000 catalog when I was still rocking my IBM 5160 and would continue to until I bought a 486DX4 PC Clone,.

I dont think people with 386's were buying 486's as some natural progression. People kept machines much longer back then. I know people using 386's into the late 90s. And I met plenty of middle aged people around 2000 who still never owned a computer.
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When the p4 was contemporary nobody I knew owned one. (They were an elitist machine). Most everybody still had K6-2 or Celeron/P2 machines. And then like a year later Athlon/Duron

My school had some random P4 1.3ghz & 1.4ghz machines but they shoehorned them into rather low end applications like the dorm web browsing lab.
The cad and engineering labs rejected them keeping the then antique Slot A Athlon machines in place with a handful higher end p3 machines.

It was a strange time (2001-2005) and people did still have the vibes of 386/486 era where low end stuff was still popular amongst us mere mortals. I ended up with a flaky 750mhz slot A tbird in 2003 because it was cheap and my Duron 700 went to the folks, I had a PCCHIPS k6-2 450 before that.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I went through my AMD-phase during the P4 era.
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Same here; had an Athlon 64 3700+ in Socket 754 and later a 4000+ in 939. A Socket 940 FX or Opteron would have been cool at the time; have access to some server-grade stuff now with Opterons, mostly IBM BladeCenter LS20 blades and a couple of Dell PowerEdge 6950s (Quad dual-core Opterons).

The contemporary Xeons to the P4 are just as inefficient and hot; the dual-core 3.73GHz Dempseys are the worst, with two of them in a Precision 690 at 130W each. That 690 had the special RAM riser boards, extended RAM cage, and kilowatt-class power supply with the C19/20 power connectors.
 
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