Best Pentium 4 desktop in 2001?

[Capt. 2110]

What would the best P4 machine have been in 2001? I'm looking to build one for early-XP games, and also just for giggles, since the motherboard I have has long had bad caps.

I'm also curious what some of the best games, in your opinions, from 2000-2003 were. Thanks!

 

[NeXT]

A Tualatin core PIII was still whipping the P4's butt until at least a year later when the Northwood core came out.
My suggestion for the P4 is go more absurd, not faster. A 1.5ghz Willamette with a gig of RDRAM is way more unique even though it will be slower than products from AMD and even Intel.

 

[krebizfan]

There were some 2 GHz Willamete P4s made in second half 2001. Fastest thing on the market at the time but overwhelmed by the Northwood about 6 months later. The fastest AMD Palomino in 2001 was close enough that it might be better for certain workloads.

Finding a reliable P4 motherboard should be an interesting challenge considering one has to navigate around bad caps and flawed chipsets.

 

[Mr. Horse]

A Tualatin core PIII was still whipping the P4's butt until at least a year later when the Northwood core came out.
My suggestion for the P4 is go more absurd, not faster. A 1.5ghz Willamette with a gig of RDRAM is way more unique even though it will be slower than products from AMD and even Intel.

Quake 3 liked the faster first gen P4s far better then the PIII-s. But yes the PIII-s was a faster system aide from games like quake3, even more so if you can get the fsb and ram at 166mhz.
Quake3 was an odd ball and loved the 400mhz fsb of the p4.

 

[lowen]

Dell's Precision 330 would be my choice for 'best' Pentium 4 desktop of 2001. With 10,000 RPM Ultra 160 SCSI hard disks as standard, Diamond FireGL 2 with 64MB AGP graphics, up to 2GB RDRAM (4x 512MB RIMMs), 4 FireWire ports, 1 USB port, Intel 850 chipset, you get a lot of bang for a lot of buck. You can get all docs and drivers from Dell even today, see the original configuration based on Service Tag number, etc. Dell's manuals page: https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/precision-330/manuals

Reviews were generally very good to great, with cost being the primary negative. One example: https://www.zdnet.com/product/dell-precision-330/

Precision workstations were and are in general built to very high standards and typically run very well for their age. Pricing is pretty good on eBay for these sorts of systems. I would rather have a five year old Precision than a low-end 2018 machine; in the case of my laptop, a Dell Precision M6700 with Core i7-3740QM, I would have to go to the higher mid-range current generation machines to get comparable performance, and I paid less than what a lower-end machine with a current generation i3 would cost (I paid about $550 for this one, off-lease and low usage two years ago).

EDIT: I have a 2001-vintage Precision 530MT here somewhere, but it's not a Pentium 4, it's a dual Xeon, but most of the same statements apply to it that apply to the 330, but the 330 was P4 single-proc. This 530MT is equipped with the RAMbus riser cards that allowed up to 4GB of RAM, and this was the first 4GB system I had seen.

 

[gepooljr]

I have a Dell Precision 330 Workstation I picked up last year. Intel Chipset, Pentium 4 1.3 GHZ, 512 Meg of RDRAM, 20(?) Gig IDE drive, NVidia TNT2 4X AGP running Windows XP. Original license was for Windows NT 4.0. Originally came in September 2001. This machine is about as powerful as they came for x86 at that time.

The overall quality of this system is amazing. All the caps are still working. Cosmetically, its not in bad shape - missing one bezel which I'm on the hunt for if I can find it.
When it came out, there was an option to run it with a SCSI drive instead of the IDE drive. Eventually, I'm planning to replace the drive with an SSD.

What is amazes me is the RDRAM IO - you can really see how much faster it is as compared to SDRAM. While the CPU is slower than a top end P3, the RDRAM more than makes up the difference.

I've tested it under Windows NT 4.0 and Windows XP. When I have a chance, I'm going to load Solaris and Red Hat Linux just to compare notes.

Geoff