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Is it about time for later Pentiums to be considered vintage?

I mean, has it not already been the upper-end of vintage for years now?
I've never seen anything past the Socket 8 Pentium pro as vintage and likely never will. By that point it's commodity hardware and
(hot take alert)
The only people who drool over newer hardware as Vintage are Gen Z's and late millennials (which I guess makes sense because as they were growing up, these were cheap second hand or family hand-me-down's). You got at least 25 years of computer hardware and history before that with micros alone. I do not see anything beyond 2000 as being overly special as by then all the oddball designs and brands were dead and folded and all you had left were mainly ATX PC's and PowerPC macs.
I have a Willamette P4 system here and even maxed out that's not vintage. It's like a NexGen CPU and board. It's a showcase piece for how much of a turd Netburst was.
 
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Up until recently i was still using a dual PIII 1GHz system quite a bit. I managed to get a few dual P2 and P3 systems in the early 2000s as I predicted these will cost a lot in the future. Have you seen the prices of some of this stuff now? Still use XP semi-regularly on a 775 xeon system, or is that 771, I don't recall. I have no P4 systems, only Xeon and a dual Athlon somewhere. I started collecting these systems years ago. I attempted to switch my desktop/fileserver to slackware a few years ago. Successful, but I never got around to installing X. To be honest with the hike in electricity costs i'd be better off with some Atom based thing. I do most of my work on an old T60 with windows 7. Have got to switch to Linux though.

About the only reason I can see for a modern system is gaming, and I still haven't got round to playing GTA4 so I'm like 15 years behind on that front.

Vogons has quite a lot of P3 and later stuff thats classed as vintage. I forget what the cut-off is on ultimateRetro is, but it's stuff that's foreign to me. I focus on the older stuff. I think up to P3 is retro now, so I'd be in favor of a forum for that. P4 stuff is debatable IMHO.
I got an Atom EeeBox that had 512meg of ram and XP on it. I maxed it out to 2gig and swapped out the 2.5" hdd and installed Duvian BeoWolf on it and was quite impressed on how well it went. All I ever read in various forums was negative comments on how "slow" they were. Made a bracket up out of ali sheet and mounted it on the back of a 19" LCD moniter. Same went for the 1.6GHz Celeron M HP Media center from 2005 I got just a month or so ago. I 'm actualy getting rather fond of these smaller form factor rigs. Grabbed an older ShuttleX rig about 6 months ago from around 2006 and had great fun with that tidying it up and maxing it out ;)IMG_20220412_074555_hdr.jpg
 
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There is a difference between how snappy a new OS feels on an old machine and how slow apps are when you actually use the machine for something.

I have a small HP mini with an Atom 1 core dual thread in it and maxed RAM (2GB) and while a stripped Win7 seems ok on it once you get a couple apps running it is slow as hell.
 
There is a difference between how snappy a new OS feels on an old machine and how slow apps are when you actually use the machine for something.

I have a small HP mini with an Atom 1 core dual thread in it and maxed RAM (2GB) and while a stripped Win7 seems ok on it once you get a couple apps running it is slow as hell.
Sorry I don't use that OS......Never ever have.

Is it any good? By your post it appears to be a resource hungry pig of an OS.
 
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I consider anything pre pentium pro vintage. You could argue they are all 32 bit, but it was still the 16bit era. Anything past that till hyperthreading/multicore I guess would be just retro? As been flogged around, always something modern you can run on a p4 thats somewhat useable. So that leaves slot based till end of agp as retro?

Ive been rebuilding and putting back together old systems recently. Getting them as clean and restored as possible. Not so much for the money in the hobby (which btw prices are going insane!), but for the love of doing that. I find more fun cobbling something together after 10+ years, or restoring an old machine to working and presentable, then I do actually using the machines themselves minus a couple.

Lately been going through 40+ giant bins of hoarded hardware jigsaw puzzles. Currenly still building that pentium pro dual (almost done,waiting on a part and have to rebuild the stupid cases power pcb, as it shares ground with the case and all the leds, and makes that Intel PR440fx go insane) , a few socket 7 / super socket 7, and a pentium 4. Gotta do something with those old voodoos and old high end gpus. All but that Pentium Pro dual are going to be resold. WHY? Because people love the older gaming machines, and I need my garage back! Plus its allowing me to focus more on pre pentium pcs and grab some machines I've lusted over as a kid. Currently trying to get a Compaq Portable I. Never did spent a bunch on this hobby, because its a hobby.

Anywho, glad ya'll can stick with retro as a modern machine. I never could do it. Not saying I have to be on the bleeding edge, but atm typing this on a 4th? gen i7 laptop and perfectly happy most part unless I want to play a game. My gaming rig is prety old today by modern standards as well... Fx 8350 and 960 nivida, 16gb ram blah blah blah. Its enough to have fun with. Perhaps I am just stuck inbetween generations. Im end of the the Xers (79). So perhaps I view things from both sides some. Definately fun to assemble an althon xp machine and play some old games. But we have hit a point most anything 2000/nt4 up will still kinda run on modern windows, or even in linux with wine. So are those older XP machines really worth anything? I dunno, but flip side of the coin, guess same could be said for Dosbox and our older pc compatibles.
 
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By the time WinXP machines came out, I don't think there were any speed sensitive games still made. I've used XP on AMD Athlon II X2 custom builds and they run super lighting fast with godlike powers! I feel no reason at all to have any older, slower XP machine. All of my old games I played back in the Pentium 4 days work with out any issues and they all run maxed out! :)
 
I remember some XP era games having issues when run on Celeron CPUs. The game could correct for differences in CPU speed and instructions but not for the slow down that a lack of cache would cause.
 
Not too long ago, I "rediscovered" an old Pentium III-based Gateway Solo laptop that I had tucked away. Mint condition, and it's the only laptop I still have that has a built in 3.5" disk drive (and CD-ROM). I think it's from around 1996.

I checked out MenuetOS which claims to be written entirely in assembly, AND can be booted from a 3.5" 1.44mb floppy (and has internet support and desktop-graphics). It doesn't have a web browser, but it did detect my wired ethernet out of the box (and had a Tetris game I think - multi window/task). Barebones but still impressive. It's not Linux based - and not sure if any C compiler available (as an add-on), but I remember on its desktop it had some assembly examples to try out.

Then I tried a couple Linux distributions: SLAX and Puppy Linux. The laptop only has 256MB RAM (think 512MB is max for the particular model I have). Both worked fine, but out of the box neither had a viable web browser (Firefox just wouldn't startup, since I think it needs a min of 512MB RAM). I learned towards Puppy Linux being easier to use, and installed Pale Moon as a GUI web browser. That browser actually worked ok -- for blog type web pages, couldn't handle stuff like YT or very "pushy" types of pages (like weather.com which is just awful for pushy ads).

I think I recall a "Tiny" Windows7 32-bit build existed at some point (that fit on a 700MB CD-ROM). Not too motivated to try it ;) Actually I might be more motivated to try OS/2 Warp...

Also, there are shops that sell SSD PATA drives - sad to put an SSD on that kind of slow interface, but easy to find modern large capacity SSDs that can retro fit into the PATA slots.
 
P4 mobile chips were based upon the P3.
The Pentium 4m used the same Northwood core the desktop chip used. Considering how different the PIII and P4 cores are, I really don’t know how a Pentium III based chip could be a Pentium 4 equivalent.

Here’s an interesting write up on the P4M with some good info:


But yes, I definitely think it’s long overdue for later Pentiums to be considered vintage. Pentium IIs, IIIs and 4s are absolutely vintage in my book.
 
I use this P4 as my daily driver. It is far from obsolete as far as I'm concerned. And has all those wonderful "legacy" ports as well. As I mentioned earlier the P4 series had a very long run until the late 2000s in to 64bit territory. https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium_4/

It also runs modern 32-bit software like the current Firefox-esr no problems at all.
 
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Yes--I've got one multiple-booted with Win98, Win7, and Debian Bullseye. The oddball thing is that the grub packaged with Bullseye seems to think that Win98 is Windows 7. That's easy to fix.
 
I'm quoting Wikipeda here:

"Pentium 4-M
Also based on the Northwood core, the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor - M[22] was released on April 23, 2002 and included Intel's SpeedStep and Deeper Sleep technologies. Intel's naming conventions made it difficult at the time of the processor's release to identify the processor model. There was the Pentium III mobile chip, the Mobile Pentium 4-M, the Mobile Pentium 4, and then just the Pentium M which itself was based on the Pentium III and significantly faster than the former three. Its TDP is about 35 watts in most applications. This lowered power consumption was due to lowered core voltage, and other features mentioned previously.

Unlike the desktop Pentium 4, the Pentium 4-M did not feature an integrated heat spreader (IHS), and it operates at a lower voltage. The lower voltage means lower power consumption, and in turn less heat. However, according to Intel specifications, the Pentium 4-M had a maximum thermal junction temperature rating of 100 degrees C, approximately 40 degrees higher than the desktop Pentium 4."

Highlight added by me.
 
The Mobile Pentium 4 was faster than the Pentium M but that was thanks to Intel capping the maximum clock speed of the Pentium M. The Mobile Pentium 4M took an amazing amount of work to turn the Pentium 4 into an almost viable competitor for the desktop Pentium III of three years before.
 
"Pentium 4-M
Also based on the Northwood core, the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor - M[22] was released on April 23, 2002 and included Intel's SpeedStep and Deeper Sleep technologies. Intel's naming conventions made it difficult at the time of the processor's release to identify the processor model. There was the Pentium III mobile chip, the Mobile Pentium 4-M, the Mobile Pentium 4, and then just the Pentium M which itself was based on the Pentium III and significantly faster than the former three. Its TDP is about 35 watts in most applications. This lowered power consumption was due to lowered core voltage, and other features mentioned previously.
Yes, the regular Pentium M was certainly based on the PIII, but not the P4M as I (and Wikipedia) stated.

If you look at a Pentium IIIM and a Pentium M side-by-side, the look almost identical with their rectangular cores, but the Pentium 4M has a square core (just like a desktop P4 gas under the heatspreader).
 
Yes, the regular Pentium M was certainly based on the PIII, but not the P4M as I (and Wikipedia) stated.

If you look at a Pentium IIIM and a Pentium M side-by-side, the look almost identical with their rectangular cores, but the Pentium 4M has a square core (just like a desktop P4 gas under the heatspreader).
The object I repeatedly referred to as the “core” is more what’s actually called the “die.” I had my CPU terminologies mixed up there for some reason even though I know better.
 
The Mobile Pentium 4 was faster than the Pentium M but that was thanks to Intel capping the maximum clock speed of the Pentium M. The Mobile Pentium 4M took an amazing amount of work to turn the Pentium 4 into an almost viable competitor for the desktop Pentium III of three years before.
Close; Pentium M officially topped out at 2.27GHz. There were three 'Mobile' Pentium 4 series: Pentium 4-M, Mobile Pentium 4, and Mobile Pentium 4 HT. Using the cpubenchmark.net benchmark comparison between the 2.26/2.27GHz Pentium M and the 2.4GHz P4-M and the 3.2GHz Mobile P4 HT (in a desktop setting!) we find that the total performance of the 2.27GHz Pentium M is essentially the same as the HT-capable Mobile P4 HT running nearly a full GHz 'faster.' (Pentium M @ 2.27 = 227, P4M@2.4GHz = 139, Mobile P4HT@3.2GHz = 232).

YES, had intel allowed Pentium M to go above say 2.6GHz it would have seriously impacted things....but, you know, that's essentially what the Core and Core 2 lines did do, building on Pentium M and going the next step. The Pentium M story is a fascinating one; tack a Pentium 4 bus interface onto a Pentium III core and optimize for power consumption.... See Pentium M Wikipedia Article. The Pentium 4M was a power hog; Pentium M (Centrino) laptops had the speed of the 4M but with significantly better battery life.

Intel did the same clock-hobbling with Pentium III; a P3 at 1.4GHz is significantly faster than a P4 at 1.4GHz (I have a Socket 423 Pentium 4 1.4GHz here.....). Had a Tualatin PIII-S been released in the 2GHz range it would have seriously embarrassed the P4 group at a time when P4 was struggling to reach 2GHz.

If 'faster' means faster clock speed.... sure, P4 is 'faster.'
 
If 'faster' means faster clock speed.... sure, P4 is 'faster.'

It's kind of ridiculous how much better a product the Pentium M was compared to the Mobile Pentium 4 variants. The company I was working for at the time bought a couple P4-M-based Dell Latitude C640s to evaluate, and they were so bad we didn't bother buying any more of them, sticking with the PIII-based C610 until the Pentium M D600 came out. I ended up inheriting one of those unloved C640s and taking it home, and it was such a dog I gave it away within a month. For very brief periods it was faster than the C610s, I guess, but it'd throttle so hard once you really made it break a sweat.

The D600, on the other hand, was revolutionary. It was only clocked a couple hundred mhz faster than the C610s, but between the larger cache and the much faster bus it'd run rings around them and actually sustain it. It was really embarrassing how much faster they were than the contemporary G4 Mac laptops that most of the engineering team was using at the time; if it wasn't for the horrible state that Linux wireless networking support was in at the time I would have switched myself.

The Pentium M definitely ranks as one of Intel's better engineering efforts. It's kind of surprising it took Intel so long to throw in the towel and make it their mainstream product. (Which they eventually did with the "Core" series.) Apparently they reaaaaally wanted NetBurst to succeed.
 
As far as I'm concerned PII and PIII based systems are what I would refer to as "borderline" vintage systems (or "tweener" systems, whatever term you wish to use) though I'm still happy to consider them a part of my collection. The one I have (a Dell Inspiron 3800, PIII) is over 20 years old and by some folks' definition certainly old enough to be considered vintage.

I don't really consider P4 systems vintage by my definition, though part of that is probably because I still use a P4 HT based system for many of my daily tasks, not just things like forum posting but even serious work. Using Windows XP and NewMoon 28.10.2a1 Workday is slow and annoying, but it works. In fact every site I use regularly (NOAA/NWS, TalkWeather, eBay, Yahoo Mail, so on so forth) still works just fine.

Only thing I can't do (which is completely a software limitation, not a hardware limitation) is print because my stupid printer demands Windows 7 and newer, so I keep around an Atom-based W7 netbook for printing, listening to music and other miniscule tasks for when I'm on the go.
 
I tend to think expanding to include the PII and PIII CPUs is the way to go since those CPUs were sold as higher performing competitors to the CPUs that the forum does support. On the other hand, I absolutely dread questions about the Super Socket 7 or the i820 chipset since both have been difficult to explain in the past. Leave out the Pentium 4 and Athlon since those include the transition to 64-bit.
 
Just by gut feeling, I can't equate Pentium IV with "vintage". Because for me personally, there is no nostalgia related to them and the performance of a decent P4 system is still very nice today for a lot of tasks (and more than what I had throughout my youth). To me, I'll only label Pentium II as "vintage" on days where I'm willing to accept that I'm not getting any younger myself. But just based on where I was in life when I used systems, 386 and 486 are vintage. Win95/98 systems, I'll go for "retro". XP...how about "outdated"? :)

I did spot something today that definately was a throwback for me though: a keyboard with an "Internet" button. 100% retro! Nothing says "where do you want to go today" like that big red button on your keyboard that you never ever used. But not vintage. Vintage is mechanical keyboards.

I started this post with "Just by gut feeling" because it's a very personal thing and a sliding scale as time progresses. Someone 20 years younger than me will perceive a P4 as an old beast. I'll look at it and say "that runs Vice City a lot better than the PC I had to use!". And then realize that it was a loooong time ago already that I played Vice City.
 
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