ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-03, 15:28:

Install XP onto a PIII 450 - 933 with 128Mb RAM and an old 8.4 - 20Gb EIDE hard disk and you will see the problems, not with itself but it relation to how that hardware runs 98.

128 megs of RAM is the problem for sure. I remember my aunt and uncle got a Celeron/Deleron Dell running XP with 128 megs of RAM in, oh, 2004 or so and... it was completely unusable for the 20 minutes or so we tried using it with 128 megs. (Now, to be fair - this machine was intentionally ordered with insufficient RAM and my uncle had separately ordered a 256 or 512 meg DIMM that went in right after we confirmed the machine was not DOA. With the extra RAM that machine became usable.)

I had XP on a PIII 700 with 768 megs of RAM and... while I had thought in fall 2001 when there was a lot of talk about XP's high hardware requirements that that machine wasn't a good candidate for XP, when it ended up getting XP later, it actually ran nicely.

Really, I would note that in my experience, all the NT-based OSes I've ever used to this day guzzle as much RAM as you can give them. If you want to see something scary, look at the RAM usage on a freshly booted Windows 11 system.

Now, to be fair, in my opinion/experience, a PIII 450-933 with 128 megs of RAM is also unusable in Win98 - you'll run out of resources in an hour and need to reboot. A problem you wouldn't have with, say, a 32-48 meg Win98 system because that system would run out of RAM before it ran out of resources.

duplicate post sorry!

Thank you all for your great insights and comments. Now let me rephrase (and edit) my original query:

Since P4 Northwoods is underpowered for these games, what games / period should I consider installing on this machine then?

1) I mean if I have to compromise for a 2000~2003 era, wouldn't a powerfull PIII (which I have) would be suffice to play 2000~2004ish era games?

2) What is a Pentium 4 good for anyways? I am so baffled, because back in the day I used to own multiple P4 machines, and they were OK/capable at playing games.

3) OK, I just found a pristine DELL OptiPlex 170L in my office, which with the following spec:

Prescott 3GHz
2GB DDR (PC3200)
PNY GeForce 6200 PCI (256MB, 550MHz)

4) Is this system capable of running *some* of those games? If not, which games (RTS, FPS) do you recommend?

Thanks!

C0deHunter wrote on 2023-09-03, 18:04:

Thank you all for your great insights and comments. Now let me rephrase (and edit) my original query: […]
Show full quote

Thank you all for your great insights and comments. Now let me rephrase (and edit) my original query:

Since P4 Northwoods is underpowered for these games, what games / period should I consider installing on this machine then?

1) I mean if I have to compromise for a 2000~2003 era, wouldn't a powerfull PIII (which I have) would be suffice to play 2000~2004ish era games?

2) What is a Pentium 4 good for anyways? I am so baffled, because back in the day I used to own multiple P4 machines, and they were OK/capable at playing games.

3) OK, I just ound a pristine DELL OptiPlex 170L in my office, which with the following spec:

Prescott 3GHz
2GB DDR (PC3200)
PNY GeForce 6200 PCI (256MB, 550MHz)

4) Is this system capable of running *some* of those games? If not, which games (RTS, FPS) do you recommend?

Thanks!

Everything but the C&C games should run fine so long as you upgrade the video card (PCI cards will just crap themselves on random games). If you want some RTS, Warcraft 3 and C&C Generals should run great on a P4.

C0deHunter wrote on 2023-09-03, 18:04:

3) OK, I just ound a pristine DELL OptiPlex 170L in my office, which with the following spec:

That's from the middle of the capacitor plague era. Avoid unless you're handy with a soldering iron.

flupke11 wrote on 2023-09-03, 11:45:

Iconic and less of a laugh than coupled with the PIII is an 3,06 Ghz i850 based Rdram-system. First to have HT and ridicoulously expensive. Put a 9700 Pro in and you have the killer system of 2002.

My Christmas present to myself in 2001 was a TH7II-RAID with 2.0 GHz Willamette, GeForce 3, and 1 GiB RDRAM. It wasn't cheap but (with upgrades) I drove that rig for most of the decade so got my moneys worth. By the end of its life it had a 3.06 GHz HT Northwood, GeForce 7600, and 2 GiB RAM.

C0deHunter wrote on 2023-09-03, 17:56:

Since P4 Northwoods is underpowered for these games, what games / period should I consider installing on this machine then?

On a Northwood running XP? Probably... the same games you'd play on a 98SE machine.

C0deHunter wrote on 2023-09-03, 17:56:

1) I mean if I have to compromise for a 2000~2003 era, wouldn't a powerfull PIII (which I have) would be suffice to play 2000~2004ish era games?

Most likely, yes...

Keep in mind that that the 1GHz PIII came out in March, 2000. The first Northwoods came out in January, 2002. That's a less than two year gap. And the first wave of socket 423 Willamettes were slower than the higher-end PIIIs; I think it's only when Willamettes hit 1.7 or 1.8GHz that they matched/exceeded PIII performance.

The P4 might be much better for a 2004 game, but then you're back at the problem that a 2006-era C2D will dramatically, dramatically outperform the Northwood, not to mention that opens the door to PCI-E GPUs and there are a lot of XP-friendly PCI-E GPUs with much higher performance than an AGP card on a Northwood.

C0deHunter wrote on 2023-09-03, 17:56:

2) What is a Pentium 4 good for anyways? I am so baffled, because back in the day I used to own multiple P4 machines, and they were OK/capable at playing games.

How about... heating rooms in winter?

I had a Pentium 4 back in the day, too, a Willamette actually that I built two weeks before the Northwood launch, complete with RDRAM. Also had a Deleron socket 478 system I built for a stupid project to make a MythTV PVR (total money pit of a project that turned out to be). Go back to articles from the Conroe launch in 2006, e.g. Anand's piece at AnandTech, and you'll see what the world was like - mediocre P4s that ran hot and were bought mostly by business folks, excellent Athlon X2s paired with chipsets some people didn't trust - and then suddenly you get a lineup of processors that beat the P4/P-D at every single benchmark. I still had my aging Willamette until then, simply because of how mediocre the P4s/P-Ds were and how I didn't want an AMD (I actually think I was very close to getting the AMD when the first rumours of Conroe came along), and then I absolutely rushed to get an E6600.

The Pentium 4 is forgotten largely because of the 2006 launch of the C2D platform, followed by the C2Q. Every piece of software you might ever want to run on a 2004-era Preshot will run just fine on a Conroe, just... at twice the speed and something like half the heat output. And the C2D/C2Q, at least if fed with enough RAM, will run 64-bit Windows 10 or unofficially 11 just fine, run modern web browsers just fine, etc. Then maybe two years later, Intel followed that with the 45nm C2D/C2Qs with a huge, huge drop in idle power consumption.

Arguably, the P4 has a place as a vintage 98SE machine - you can get a higher-performance 98SE machine out of a higher-clocked Northwood/Prescott/etc than a P3, at least if you're an Intel fanboy. If you're not an Intel fanboy and you can find a board that doesn't have bad caps, I suspect you may be better off with an Athlon XP Socket A board for 98SE. And that's why you can buy a Pentium 4/D chip on eBay for way less than the cost of Socket A Athlon XPs... (trust me, I have a Pentium D 945 in an anti-static bag to show for it.)

C0deHunter wrote on 2023-09-03, 18:04:

Thank you all for your great insights and comments. Now let me rephrase (and edit) my original query: […]
Show full quote

Thank you all for your great insights and comments. Now let me rephrase (and edit) my original query:

Since P4 Northwoods is underpowered for these games, what games / period should I consider installing on this machine then?

1) I mean if I have to compromise for a 2000~2003 era, wouldn't a powerfull PIII (which I have) would be suffice to play 2000~2004ish era games?

2) What is a Pentium 4 good for anyways? I am so baffled, because back in the day I used to own multiple P4 machines, and they were OK/capable at playing games.

3) OK, I just ound a pristine DELL OptiPlex 170L in my office, which with the following spec:

Prescott 3GHz
2GB DDR (PC3200)
PNY GeForce 6200 PCI (256MB, 550MHz)

4) Is this system capable of running *some* of those games? If not, which games (RTS, FPS) do you recommend?

Thanks!

The PCI 6200 will be a very limiting factor in this setup.
If the system has an agp or PCIe slot, you may consider upgrading. If not, then i would not advise to game on it.

A GeForce 6600GT / 6800, a Radeon X800/X850 would be quite period correct. You might also consider the Radeon 9700/9800 (earlier) or GeForce 7 series and Radeon X1800/X1900 (later generation)

With this kind of config, the Original engine Half-Life 2 will be playable with correct performances, Far cry as well, but not later gamed like FEAR. Doom3 actually released before HL2 but I always had the feeling that it ran slower than HL2 on the same system.

Games like UT2003/2004, Serious Sam, Morrowind, oblivion with medium settings. GTA SA.

Edit : VivienM wrote exactly the same thing above. We must have some psychic connection

Early P4 were not great. Early Willamette were worse than P3. Only 2nd release of Willamette (>1.7Ghz) started to outperform P3.
Later, Athlons were cheaper and performed sometimes better. P4 took again the performance lead over the late Athlon XP but AMD released Athlon64 shortly after and basically P4 / Pentium D never surpassed Athlons again (Except maybe for their $1k ExtremeEdition P4s). Intel only surpassed AMD later with Core / Core2.

Pentium4 were actually decent. They were just not the best price/performance (/heat 😄) ratio.
I guess most people here reminds P4 as "the expensive CPU that were ok-ish and ran super hot". So not extremely popular.

P4s wernt popular because they were so much more expensive than the AMD equal in desktop CPUs.
AMD CPUs were cheaper and so were the boards to put them on. Being good doesnt sell computers, being cheap does.

There is nothing, and wasnt at the time, wrong with the Pentium 4 once you get up to and past the 2.4GHz mark.
Once you get to the 2.4GHz you leave behind any idea about the Pentium III being able to put in a good show. I mean a 2GHz P4 will beat a PIII but it wont destroy it completely. where as the 2.4 killed it and by the time you got to the 3.06HT the PIII was dead dead DEAD!

The AMD Athlon XP CPUs of the time that we consider the equals can put in just as good a show as the P4 can. The difference was that the AMDs were cheaper, which doesnt count for much any more. An Athlon XP3200 system and a P4 3.2 would be about equal... Not much between them in most practical terms at the time and being as how nobody is encoding video on them or using it as a top of the line rig then the differences drops away even more.

If you are considering an "early XP" system, by which I mean XP > XP SP1a then an Athlon XP shouldnt be dismissed as easily as all that.
The 64bit CPUs I consider the next era so I wont mention them much beyond saying that they are the next era.

Consider the form factor of the motherboard you want.
Do you want it in a big case that fits under the desk or a nice one that fits on it?

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-03, 19:41:

If you are considering an "early XP" system, by which I mean XP > XP SP1a then an Athlon XP shouldnt be dismissed as easily as all that.
The 64bit CPUs I consider the next era so I wont mention them much beyond saying that they are the next era.

I'm as big an Intel fanboy as anyone, but even I would probably say that the era between the PIII and the Conroe C2D is best forgotten, especially for a retro gaming system where stability is not exactly as important as a system you used for daily work back in the day. The Athlon XP/64/64 X2 will outperform pretty much most of the Intels of the time and not heat up the room the same way...

My recollection at the time is that there was one or two higher-clocked Northwoods that had a solid enthusiast following, otherwise it was Athlons getting all the love... until the C2D obsoleted the entire AMD lineup and the entire Pentium 4/D lineup in one day.

Apart from the mental block people have over computers as space heaters.

Can show me that an Atlon XP will beat the equal P4?
Because from what I remember it was all about the Athlon XP being able to beat the Pentium 4 because of its price point compared to its performance.
Like you needed a 2400+ to beat the 2GHz P4. But the 2400 wasnt the equal to the 2GHz P4, the 2000+ was.

I ask because I went with the Xeon from the Prestonia core CPUs, before that I was on a dual MP2400 and before that it was a dual PIII 1400, and I stayed with dual CPUs from that day to this.
So I missed the whole race, I only watched it happen as it were.
The only single CPU I really remember having was a P4 3.06HT 533.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-03, 21:17:

Apart from the mental block people have over computers as space heaters. […]
Show full quote

Apart from the mental block people have over computers as space heaters.

Can show me that an Atlon XP will beat the equal P4?
Because from what I remember it was all about the Athlon XP being able to beat the Pentium 4 because of its price point compared to its performance.
Like you needed a 2400+ to beat the 2GHz P4. But the 2400 wasnt the equal to the 2GHz P4, the 2000+ was.

I ask because I went with the Xeon from the Prestonia core CPUs, before that I was on a dual MP2400 and before that it was a dual PIII 1400, and I stayed with dual CPUs from that day to this.
So I missed the whole race, I only watched it happen as it were.
The only single CPU I really remember having was a P4 3.06HT 533.

You can go through old reviews from e.g. AnandTech, e.g. you've got
https://www.anandtech.com/show/866/13 - they're saying the (older) Athlon XP is competitive with the brand new Northwood
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1066/30 - Barton review a year later, "In many cases the Athlon XP 3000+ can outperform the 3.06GHz Pentium 4, while in others it manages to tie with Intel's flagship and yet in others it falls behind just as much. The overall performance is close enough to warrant the 3000+ rating in some cases, but there's no question that it is a very close call between the two top performing CPUs. Looking at the CPU scaling charts alone you can get an idea for how competitive the two CPU families have become, as the Pentium 4 improved in performance and the Athlon XP continued to mature."
They go on to say - "With Barton launched, the focus once again shifts to Athlon 64 but we have a feeling it will be a very close battle throughout 2003 for AMD and Intel. The Athlon 64 may unequivocally tilt the balance in favor of AMD, but then there's Prescott to worry about."
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1230/25 - this is their Prescott review a year later, now they're saying "When you include AMD in the picture, the recommendation hasn’t changed since the Athlon 64 was introduced. If you find yourself using Microsoft Office for most of your tasks and if you’re a gamer the decision is clear: the Athlon 64 is for you. The Pentium 4 continues to hold advantages in content creation applications, 3D rendering and media encoding; if we just described how you use your computer then the Pentium 4 is for you, but the stipulation about Northwood vs. Prescott from above still applies." So basically, Prescott turned out... not to be worth worrying about.

I'm not going to go through every CPU review they did in 2002/2003/2004 right about now, but my recollection is that there was a brief moment in time when the higher-clocked Northwoods beat everything from AMD, then newer Athlon XP cores came out, then Athlon 64 came along, the Preshot underwhelmed, etc, and that led to the world of 2005 when the trendy processor was the X2 3800+ on socket 939. Then all the AMD fanboys traded in their 3800+s for Intel C2Q Q6600s a few years later when that became the go-to CPU...

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-03, 21:32:

You can go through old reviews from e.g. AnandTech, e.g. you've got https://www.anandtech.com/show/866/13 - they're saying the ( […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-03, 21:17:

Apart from the mental block people have over computers as space heaters. […]
Show full quote

Apart from the mental block people have over computers as space heaters.

Can show me that an Atlon XP will beat the equal P4?
Because from what I remember it was all about the Athlon XP being able to beat the Pentium 4 because of its price point compared to its performance.
Like you needed a 2400+ to beat the 2GHz P4. But the 2400 wasnt the equal to the 2GHz P4, the 2000+ was.

I ask because I went with the Xeon from the Prestonia core CPUs, before that I was on a dual MP2400 and before that it was a dual PIII 1400, and I stayed with dual CPUs from that day to this.
So I missed the whole race, I only watched it happen as it were.
The only single CPU I really remember having was a P4 3.06HT 533.

You can go through old reviews from e.g. AnandTech, e.g. you've got
https://www.anandtech.com/show/866/13 - they're saying the (older) Athlon XP is competitive with the brand new Northwood
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1066/30 - Barton review a year later, "In many cases the Athlon XP 3000+ can outperform the 3.06GHz Pentium 4, while in others it manages to tie with Intel's flagship and yet in others it falls behind just as much. The overall performance is close enough to warrant the 3000+ rating in some cases, but there's no question that it is a very close call between the two top performing CPUs. Looking at the CPU scaling charts alone you can get an idea for how competitive the two CPU families have become, as the Pentium 4 improved in performance and the Athlon XP continued to mature."
They go on to say - "With Barton launched, the focus once again shifts to Athlon 64 but we have a feeling it will be a very close battle throughout 2003 for AMD and Intel. The Athlon 64 may unequivocally tilt the balance in favor of AMD, but then there's Prescott to worry about."
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1230/25 - this is their Prescott review a year later, now they're saying "When you include AMD in the picture, the recommendation hasn’t changed since the Athlon 64 was introduced. If you find yourself using Microsoft Office for most of your tasks and if you’re a gamer the decision is clear: the Athlon 64 is for you. The Pentium 4 continues to hold advantages in content creation applications, 3D rendering and media encoding; if we just described how you use your computer then the Pentium 4 is for you, but the stipulation about Northwood vs. Prescott from above still applies." So basically, Prescott turned out... not to be worth worrying about.

I'm not going to go through every CPU review they did in 2002/2003/2004 right about now, but my recollection is that there was a brief moment in time when the higher-clocked Northwoods beat everything from AMD, then newer Athlon XP cores came out, then Athlon 64 came along, the Preshot underwhelmed, etc, and that led to the world of 2005 when the trendy processor was the X2 3800+ on socket 939. Then all the AMD fanboys traded in their 3800+s for Intel C2Q Q6600s a few years later when that became the go-to CPU...

Yeah see those links are exactly what Im talking about.
They are not equals.
The Barton core was equal to the Prescott not the Northwood. But thats all you ever get rolled out as a comparision. Because they were out not because they were equals.

As it turned out when AMD released the x64 CPUs it did tip the balance in AMDs favor until Intel decided to drop Northwoods and Prescott in favor of developing the PIII mobile core processors into the Core line of CPUs.

But getting back to the comparison of equals.
Looking back as we now can how do the equals compare to each other now nearly 20 years later?

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:02:

Looking back as we now can how do the equals compare to each other now nearly 20 years later?

Phil has a bunch of Intel vs. AMD comparison videos on his channel.

This one may be of interest, though I wholeheartedly recommend watching the entire series.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:02:

They are not equals.
The Barton core was equal to the Prescott not the Northwood. But thats all you ever get rolled out as a comparision. Because they were out not because they were equals.

period correct Half Life 2 CPU Performance test

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:02:

But getting back to the comparison of equals.
Looking back as we now can how do the equals compare to each other now nearly 20 years later?

I guess the more important question is, does it really matter 20 years later?

Neither Bartons, nor Northwoods, nor Preshots are contenders for the ultimate-anything that I can think of. If you want an ultimate 98SE build, there are options both AMD and Intel that will outperform all of those. (Yes, I've seen many of Phil's videos too...)

If you want an XP system, which was the OP's original thinking, well, I think the consensus view was that 20 years later, none of them are particularly that great for an XP box.

If you want a reasonable non-ultimate 98SE build to run some things that don't play nicely with XP, my guess is that all of them will perform very, very nicely. Most of the games that don't get along with XP would have been written for, oh, I don't know, a PII 450, a K6-2/K6-3, maybe a higher-clocked PIII. Any of those will scream on a high-powered CPU from 2003. So then, I think it really comes back to cost, availability, loyalty, other quirks of the platform, availability of supporting parts (e.g. the right PSUs, CPU coolers, RAM, etc), etc.

I will make one observation that I won't try to explain - quick ebay searching suggests that the 3.06GHz Northwood, at least, is plentiful and cheap. The 3.2 not so much. But when I was looking for later Athlon XPs a week or two ago, well, let's just say I wasn't finding the equivalent to that 3.06GHz Northwood at those kinds of prices. I wonder what that tells us - either about supply or demand...

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:46:

I will make one observation that I won't try to explain - quick ebay searching suggests that the 3.06GHz Northwood, at least, is plentiful and cheap. The 3.2 not so much. But when I was looking for later Athlon XPs a week or two ago, well, let's just say I wasn't finding the equivalent to that 3.06GHz Northwood at those kinds of prices. I wonder what that tells us - either about supply or demand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_ … ._v._Intel_Corp.

Intel was bribing system integrators to not ship any AMD systems. Dell alone received >$1Billion. This is why Pentium 4 systems are so plentiful and cheap, every office PC in existence at the time was Pentium 4 on motherboard with Intel chipset. AMD was scrapping by in enthusiast, mom&pop and DIY markets despite leading technologically and offering cheaper product.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:07:

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:02:

Looking back as we now can how do the equals compare to each other now nearly 20 years later?

Phil has a bunch of Intel vs. AMD comparison videos on his channel.

This one may be of interest, though I wholeheartedly recommend watching the entire series.

Yeah see when its done like for like its not as cut n dried as you would be made to believe.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:25:

period correct Half Life 2 CPU Performance test https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/half%20life%202%20cpu%20scaling_01260560148/ […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:02:

They are not equals.
The Barton core was equal to the Prescott not the Northwood. But thats all you ever get rolled out as a comparision. Because they were out not because they were equals.

period correct Half Life 2 CPU Performance test

Thats a good example in its own way. The x64 AMDs really did steal the show for a long time. It took them a long time to recover from that too from what I remember. the Itanium and Itanium 2 lines really were a mistake for them, and not thinking of a simple solution. But thats a conversation for a different thread.

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:46:

I guess the more important question is, does it really matter 20 years later? […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:02:

But getting back to the comparison of equals.
Looking back as we now can how do the equals compare to each other now nearly 20 years later?

I guess the more important question is, does it really matter 20 years later?

Neither Bartons, nor Northwoods, nor Preshots are contenders for the ultimate-anything that I can think of. If you want an ultimate 98SE build, there are options both AMD and Intel that will outperform all of those. (Yes, I've seen many of Phil's videos too...)

If you want an XP system, which was the OP's original thinking, well, I think the consensus view was that 20 years later, none of them are particularly that great for an XP box.

If you want a reasonable non-ultimate 98SE build to run some things that don't play nicely with XP, my guess is that all of them will perform very, very nicely. Most of the games that don't get along with XP would have been written for, oh, I don't know, a PII 450, a K6-2/K6-3, maybe a higher-clocked PIII. Any of those will scream on a high-powered CPU from 2003. So then, I think it really comes back to cost, availability, loyalty, other quirks of the platform, availability of supporting parts (e.g. the right PSUs, CPU coolers, RAM, etc), etc.

I will make one observation that I won't try to explain - quick ebay searching suggests that the 3.06GHz Northwood, at least, is plentiful and cheap. The 3.2 not so much. But when I was looking for later Athlon XPs a week or two ago, well, let's just say I wasn't finding the equivalent to that 3.06GHz Northwood at those kinds of prices. I wonder what that tells us - either about supply or demand...

Well in the grand scheme of things no of course not, its pedantry.
As it is 20 years later and we are talking about what would be best then that pedantry comes out to the fore.

No I must admit I think the same, none of those CPUs could ever be considered as an "ultimate early XP" at all, I think that term is way over used because if you are going to go there then they all had multi processor versions and XP was a dual socket licence. So no system based on a desktop CPU that isnt a Xeon or equal could ever be used in an Ultimate XP system of any era. Because it is only ever going to be half of what it can be in the processor department.
Ultimate implies the top or pretty close, not 50% of what you can have if you really wanted to.

Ragards to the "shortage" of the higher clock Athlon XPs no I dont know either, because the stories would have you believe the AMD CPUs were more popular and sold more than the Intel versions, but now when you come to look the supply is low like you say. Im not sure if that is because the retro gamers have bought them all up or that there arent all that many out there after all.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-09-03, 23:19:

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-03, 22:46:

I will make one observation that I won't try to explain - quick ebay searching suggests that the 3.06GHz Northwood, at least, is plentiful and cheap. The 3.2 not so much. But when I was looking for later Athlon XPs a week or two ago, well, let's just say I wasn't finding the equivalent to that 3.06GHz Northwood at those kinds of prices. I wonder what that tells us - either about supply or demand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_ … ._v._Intel_Corp.

Intel was bribing system integrators to not ship any AMD systems. Dell alone received >$1Billion. This is why Pentium 4 systems are so plentiful and cheap, every office PC in existence at the time was Pentium 4 on motherboard with Intel chipset. AMD was scrapping by in enthusiast, mom&pop and DIY markets despite leading technologically and offering cheaper product.

Yes they did do that. And a lot of those systems hit the used market some time ago when XP systems finally died.
However I will take issue with you on the leading tech when all objective tests now with tools that are preiod correct show the Intels do outperform their AMD equals.
AMD were cheaper though... and the tests seem to show there was a reason for that.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-03, 23:31:

However I will take issue with you on the leading tech when all objective tests now with tools that are preiod correct show the Intels do outperform their AMD equals.
AMD were cheaper though... and the tests seem to show there was a reason for that.

This was the time when AMD was first with 64bits, memory controller integrated in the CPU, dual core processors. AnandTech screenshot from Half life 2 tests doesnt lie.

One needs to look at the Doom 3 timedemo thread (Doom 3 timedemo shootout with period correct hardware.) to see that despite being overpriced, Pentium 4 was still capable of very good performance during the period.

When taking price out of the equation - Athlon XP<Pentium 4<Athlon 64

Munx wrote on 2023-09-03, 11:06:

C0deHunter wrote on 2023-09-03, 10:54:

Command and Conquer 3, and 4
Red Alert 3

These games are beyond Pentium 4, not only in power requirements, but also in time period. People were playing these on dual core systems. Also C&C4 totally does not exist, no need to even look it up.

Personally I'd go with an HT Prescott, since IMO it kind of represents Netburst better (even higher clocks for even less per-clock performance)

I've been playing C&C3 on a 2.4GHz Northwood Celeron. I had it up until 2009. Though it is true, it wasn't fast, it was playable.