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Pentium 4

So doing some research and I can see the appeal of a socket 423 system. Not from a performance standpoint obviously.

But the socket type stayed in production for less than a year in the midst of the capacitor plague, making it a fairly rare these days.
 
VERAULT said:
I just dont get it. I see this silly young guys clogging up youtube with videos marked "Vintage computer pickup" or "huge vintage computer Hauls"... Because they are too young and too stupid to realize the world existed long before they did and this stuff is just modern waste.
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I'm sure some older folk would probably say (or have said) that all PCs are just modern mass-produced rubbish compared to their mainframes and minis. I hold stuff that was around when I was young and from before I was born in reverence, and treat more modern things like P4s as just something that is useful. Younger people than me may have grown up with P4s and want to relive that experience, or may just be fascinated by stuff that was around before their time in the same way I am about things ranging from DEC PDPs which I've never touched to DOS which I used for years: wow, look how hard it was to do stuff with these machines compared to how it is today, but on the other hand how much easier it was before you had Microsoft spyware running in the background.

Also, there's a bit of a practical appeal if you want to play games from the P4 era (which yes, I'm sure you don't personally :LOL: ): if you have a Windows game that no longer runs on modern Windows out of the box, P4s are generally too fast to emulate, so just playing on a period-appropriate machine can be a lot easier than fighting with third party patches to get the games to work.
 
doshea said:
Younger people than me may have grown up with P4s and want to relive that experience
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I lived through that experience, in no way do I ever want to relive it. I was on AMD throughout the entire P4 era, and I remember the bemoaning of gamers gloating about their hot stuff P4 and how it cost them so much and how good it was. Only to have terrible game performance on the HT models and they couldn't figure out why. Games at the time were still primarily single thread applications, and with HT enabled, you lose about 50% of the processors performance. Disabling HT would get you all of that lost performance back, but then why did you pay a premium for a HT CPU in the first place.

My succession of Duron, Athlon and then Athlon XP parts kept me content. When I got my first Athlon 64 system, I was blown away with the massive performance uplift. I of course wasn't exempt from the capacitor plague and lost several boards to it. I wish I had the soldering skills at the time to fix those boards, because they're near unobtanium today.

doshea said:
Also, there's a bit of a practical appeal if you want to play games from the P4 era (which yes, I'm sure you don't personally :LOL: ): if you have a Windows game that no longer runs on modern Windows out of the box, P4s are generally too fast to emulate, so just playing on a period-appropriate machine can be a lot easier than fighting with third party patches to get the games to work.
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WINE on Linux is getting better at playing old Windows games than Windows itself is. There is also rapidly maturing emulation software where you can just emulate old systems with all of the expensive addon cards in software, and not have to pay the crazy prices for the real old hardware.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
So doing some research and I can see the appeal of a socket 423 system. Not from a performance standpoint obviously.

But the socket type stayed in production for less than a year in the midst of the capacitor plague, making it a fairly rare these days.
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Yes, very rare and cool for what it represented. I have a pre production motherboard and CPU kit sample from Intel, got it by surprise. Still working after all this years, being manufactured in the capacitor plague era, is a very good thing.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
WINE on Linux is getting better at playing old Windows games than Windows itself is. There is also rapidly maturing emulation software where you can just emulate old systems with all of the expensive addon cards in software, and not have to pay the crazy prices for the real old hardware.
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I wonder how that "boxed wine" project is going for users who don't use Linux? As for emulation, I got the impression that it's a stretch to emulate a P3 on modern systems (at typical P3 clock rates), let alone a P4.
 
lucasdaytona said:
Yes, very rare and cool for what it represented. I have a pre production motherboard and CPU kit sample from Intel, got it by surprise. Still working after all this years, being manufactured in the capacitor plague era, is a very good thing.
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Engineering samples are going to have been assembled with more love and care than mass-market boards, so probably used better-quality caps. Still a very neat find. I must avoid getting into collecting such things myself, for down this road lies madness.

doshea said:
I wonder how that "boxed wine" project is going for users who don't use Linux? As for emulation, I got the impression that it's a stretch to emulate a P3 on modern systems (at typical P3 clock rates), let alone a P4.
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I probably really ot to get in to Wine as a way to learn Linux. I have not found the linux community to be terribly newbie-friendly, though the raspberry pi and ubuntu groups are a bit nicer.
 
lucasdaytona said:
Yes, very rare
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Uncommon you mean im sure. The term "rare" and "very rare" have been way over used and have really killed eBays legitimacy in selling descriptions.

They were mass produced, there are many of them out there. Its a nit pick but a good one. Few things are actually RARE or VERY RARE in discussions and items people are talking about here.
 
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hunterjwizzard said:
I probably really ot to get in to Wine as a way to learn Linux. I have not found the linux community to be terribly newbie-friendly, though the raspberry pi and ubuntu groups are a bit nicer.
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I've had Wine on my Linux boxes for years. It's hit-and-miss with regards to real Windows compatibility. I don't see where using it would help you to learn Linux at all. For the must-use odd Windows program, I use Virtualbox running a version of Windows.
 
doshea said:
As for emulation, I got the impression that it's a stretch to emulate a P3 on modern systems (at typical P3 clock rates), let alone a P4.
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By the time of the Pentium 3/4, there were extremely few games that were speed dependent. The only one I know of that late was I think Lego Island. The majority of issues are dependencies on depreciated/discontinued APIs, or just plain bad programming. Emulating old APIs is a lot easier than trying to emulate cycles of a P3/P4.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
By the time of the Pentium 3/4, there were extremely few games that were speed dependent. The only one I know of that late was I think Lego Island. The majority of issues are dependencies on depreciated/discontinued APIs, or just plain bad programming. Emulating old APIs is a lot easier than trying to emulate cycles of a P3/P4.
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That is the thing that just makes my eyes kind of glaze over on the topic of ever feeling the need to build some specific vintage of gaming computer for anything post 1999 or so. I know people have their gripes about the approach, but companies like GOG and, as much as I hate to give them any credit, Steam, have done a really effective job of packaging up the vast majority of old Windows games so not only will they run on modern versions of Windows, many of them will run on Linux with very little effort. Unless you're *very specifically* going after the exact aesthetic of running these games on their original (objectively pretty terrrible) 3D hardware or targeting specific games that only worked with oddball hardware or otherwise had very specific requirements that are hard to simulate, well... yeah, I guess I don't really feel like the need is there.

But, obviously, my priorities do not align with the people that *do* feel the need to bid up to ridiculous numbers the eBay prices of old AGP video cards, so... yeah. Different strokes I guess.
 
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Chuck(G) said:
I've had Wine on my Linux boxes for years. It's hit-and-miss with regards to real Windows compatibility. I don't see where using it would help you to learn Linux at all. For the must-use odd Windows program, I use Virtualbox running a version of Windows.
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Because learning to configure and use wine would involve using linux. I've found the best way for myself to pick up new skills is to begin goal-oriented projects that require those skills. I've no interest in setting up web servers or a number of other things, but getting all my most-used applications to run on linux would be a good project.

Unless M$ does a fairly hard 180 in the coming years, I probably will not be able to use many windows versions beyond 12. I can already only tolerate 10 after breaking several key features. I need a workstation capable of running modern software every now and then. It seems like switching to Linux is the logical step. But thats a transition that will take years.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I've never found that knowing Linux helped or hindered using Wine. I think the best way is to get familiar with Linux commands, which really underlies the whole principle. Wine is just another program that runs under Linux.
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Yes. And so far Wine is the only program I know of that I want to run on Linux.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I've never found that knowing Linux helped or hindered using Wine. I think the best way is to get familiar with Linux commands, which really underlies the whole principle. Wine is just another program that runs under Linux.
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If you want to use some of the advanced features and/or configure custom dependencies, bash knowledge is basically a requirement.
 
VERAULT said:
There are MANY office equivalents on linux which do not have the STUPID ribbon and mirror Office 2003... So essentially. YES.
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Probably not on steam, though :p

But yes, I have tried several of the variants(most have windows ports). The ribbon interface is my alamo, I will die before I use it. I have been concerned for some years that the next version of windows will finally break all support for Office 2003 and I would be forced into an alternative.

At this point its looking like Windows will become unusable before that happens. So if I'm forced to change operating systems, it will be linux.

But here's the rub: you linux guys are always going on about how you can get "anything" to run under linux. So why adjust an alternative when I can make my preferred program run? Something as simple as Word shouldn't require a VM hat trick, and I don't use any of the advanced features that might not be supported anyway. Seems obvious to me.
 
I agree, the ribbon was the death of long standing productivity. Im running windows 7. IT will be the last version of windows I use. I have already switched two home pcs to Ubuntu LTS.

And again. Word processing is ancient. It was mastered under Linux 2 decades ago.... You have no reason to use Word other than just your choice....
 
Funny to see how many people seem to hate ribbon. I must be one of the only people out there who like it!
 
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