My first thought when I see such read speeds: the IDE controller is in PIO4 mode instead of UltraDMA. The most common cause of this behavior is using a 40-wire IDE cable instead of a 80-wire one (or bad quality of that cable).
40pin work with dma but only like dma 3, it's 30mbs, so it's not so bad. Yes 80 pin is better, with more modern like p4 or even PIII, but most important is manually check and configure bios. And of course use new or tested and good hdd or ssd for best speed. And don't forget install latest chipset driver like we so in a video.
My first thought of this was "Pentium 4 Willamette/S432 with PC133 Memory". And it indeed is using PC-133 memory, which the P4 really doesn't like. And making it faster is practical with a more modern Board, Single Channel DDR-SDRAM at bare minimum, Dual Channel (i865PE) recommended.
That is what I went with on an ABIT AS8 motherboard (i865PE) and DDR dual channel 2x1GB 3200 rated? I forget now. Pentium 4 640 Prescott. Pretty good hybrid system with AGP 8x support. Never had the chance to try it with an SSD drive though.
SDRAM slows down the P4, but nothing like _that._ You wouldn't notice in everyday use. It's a bottleneck, but it isn't crippling. Windows XP on an SSD moves like it's bathed in Crisco, going downhill on a Slip n' Slide. I remember the first boot on an SSD. The XP Pro loading screen had the chance to move the blue dots about 2/3rds of a trip from left to right before the screen blanked and went to the desktop. It does depend on what else you have (physically) installed, and what drivers you have loaded, as some hardware just takes a moment to initialize. In that case it doesn't matter how fast your storage, RAM, or CPU are.
@@nickwallette6201 I have an SSD in my older ASUS TUSL2-C board with Pentium 3 1400S and 512MB SDRAM. That machine is as quick and responsive as my modern systems, albeit using Windows 98SE and older period correct software etc.
@@nickwallette6201 indeed. As I remember - the first question about P4 PC performance was its memory type. But SDRAM with P4 only meant P4 would not be much faster than P3, not slower because P3 had the same SDRAM anyway.
Even with RD ram the P4 1.5 was only _slightly_ faster than the Coppermine 1ghz. It was pretty bad. And sometimes even slower. Only in things like Quake 3 and optimised applications like MP3 compression was that 1.5 able to outrun the P3. Putting that 1.5 on SDram in fact makes it _slower_ than a coppermine 1ghz machine. Its really sad how bad early P4's were. Northwood hyperthreading P4's were a pretty decent chip though.
Yes, Pentium 3 systems went to up to 1,5GHz or thereabout, but those Chips are pretty rare (Tualatin). And you need a compatible Chipset (or mod your board) as well. @@SaraMorgan-ym6ue
At the same time Intel was failing with long pipelines and high clock rates in 32 bit Netburst, AMD developed the 64 bit architecture that both AMD and Intel are using to this day. Prior implementations of 64 bit (including Intel's ill-fated Itanium) all had major disadvantages preventing PC, workstation, and low-end server adoption. Not only can an OS running in AMD64 "long mode" still run 32-bit programs, but the way the instruction set is designed, 64 bit programs can and frequently do use 32 bit instructions for performance. They have to use 64 bit pointers, but that performance hit is offset by the gains from the instruction pointer relative address mode AMD added.
Defragging the hard drive as well as defragging system files offline (hibernation file, page file, MFT file, and registry hives) can also have a significant impact on performance, especially with a system installed in an HDD
Davy, I am so glad you are back. Thanks for taking us along as you solved this, it was a great watch! And to think that machine might have spent a good portion of its life being so misconfigured, how unfortunate! Glad you fixed it up :)
Par for the course, fresh OS install - doesn't matter if its a Celeron or a 3.8Ghz Extreme Edition, give it a few weeks, it'll be grinding, shovelling and displacing bits and bytes like a gaggle of lethargic road sweepers.
@@polaxis842 The P4 wasn't that slow. Initially, the S423 ones weren't a great deal faster than the highest-performance Tualatin P-IIIs of the time, but those were also _really_ expensive, and never got cheap enough to be a value buy. The P4 came into its own when the clock speeds got higher. Once you got to 1.8GHz, they were worth jumping to from a Pentium III. The other problem was memory. Since Intel had to go through that messy divorce with RAMBUS, we had to wait far too long for proper DDR support. When you're stuck between expensive and clunky RDRAM and SDRAM, you're not doing the P4 CPU and Northbridge chipset any favors. Those two factors gave the P4 a bad rep that they never completely recovered from, but a Northwood with DDR performs quite well. Once you got _too_ far into the later P4s, we bumped into the practical limit on clock speed, and it was clear the whole architecture had no future. But, in its sweet spot, the P4 was still a fine performer. I had a colleague at work, at the time, who was a die-hard Athlon XP fan. When the Northwoods showed up on store shelves, he switched teams -- dubiously, but curious how far he could push them with overclocking. He got a 1.8GHz chip up to 3GHz with no trouble at all, and it ran circles around the AMD rig he was using. He flipped to Intel overnight. Not to talk smack about AMD. I think Intel would've languished without them. I just don't think it's fair to crap on the P4. I will absolutely admit, though, that the Core and Core 2 line made it clear that the P4 was a design mistake. Still, my Windows XP rig to this day is a Northwood 2.0GHz on an Abit IC7-G with 2GB DDR, and a pair of Seagate Barracuda SATA drives in RAID-0. It's _plenty_ snappy. I just wish you could still find a working Radeon 9700 Pro to compete the quintessential Blue Team build of the day. Alas, the GPUs are fundamentally flawed in the same way the Xbox 360 and PS3 Gen 1 CPUs were. RIP.
@@polaxis842 I have an Asrock P4i65g and ran it with a Prescott 3.4 and a Northwood 3.0 with Win 7 on an SSD. It previously ran XP on a HDD. It ran pretty well, though I didn't do benchmarks. Decided to retire it and got an Asrock 775i65pe and Pentium D 950 with Win 10 1511. It too runs quite well for its age.
@@alexanderangelov230 That is quite some oldschool hardware in the meantime 🙂 From my experience: It did run Windows + Office + games from the same time period very well. But even for browsing, the CPU was heavily on edge :)
@@polaxis842 Of course Pentium has nothing on Core. But that was my first pc, a budget one, from 2005, and it came with a Celeron 2.4. The Pentium was a welcome upgrade.
I could be many things. Caps may look fine from outside but they may be losing capacitace or some voltage regulator maybe running too hot or some IC/option is holding system back. Even a bad power supply can perform a slowness role. When you said ~3MB/s transfers, my mind screamed DMA is off in Device Manager. Over 10 years ago, I had XP installed on a system like these. The HDD unfortunatelly was about to die.... some bad sectors or perhaps a range of bad sectors. I noticed that XP autoswitched from DMA on to off and the system became pretty slow like this video showed. Cables sometimes can make things harder when we push the cable and not the thin black plastic. One wire broken is what's needed to make a bad cable.
For anyone wonder how to check the mode, open Device Manager. Go to IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Then right click Primary IDE Channel and select Properties. Then in the window that pops up go to the Advanced Settings Tab. It'll show the current transfer mode there. I've had a similar issue with my x40 before that was likely related to a failing drive where it'd fall back into PIO mode occasionally and the solution was to uninstall the IDE controller device and restart and let it reinstall it.
@@aleksa1987 Not necessarily. Going back to Device Manager and check if DMA is set "if available" under ATA/ATAPI controllers/Primary channel. Deleting the Primary Channel and say yes to restart, should reinstall that devie and enumerate the hdds there connected.
this makes me remember when i had a core 2 duo setup and my usb transfer speeds were like TOTAL TRASH and some dongles i used didn't work at all, and at the end i noticed that in the bios the ports were setup as usb 1.0 instead of 2.0
Hmm. I was expecting this to be about the CPU being slow, given the title. A disk being slow could happen on any computer. But, still, it was an interesting dive into the system, and interesting how much difference the drivers made. That seems much less the case today.
In my experience, systems that have 3 RAM slots were generally designed with the capability to overclock the chipset if you only occupied 2 of the RAM slots. The board traces were too long to overclock with the 3rd slot occupied. Your mileage may vary, possibly significantly, because my experience was from a totally different motherboard. Still, there was a reason for 3 RAM slot systems back in the day, and it was usually a choice of running the chipset overclocked with only 2 slots occupied, or running the chipset at stock speed with all 3 slots occupied.
@@lucasrem My username on other services is literally over_clox, so no, I'm most definitely not new to the scene. Probably newer to this channel though if that's what you meant.
@@lucasrem Also, I think the system I was referring to was an early ASUS board from 2003, but I kinda forget now. Regardless, there were some unique design decisions made with systems that had an odd number of memory slots.
Your videos are made very well. Clear and easy to follow. Thank you
7 месяцев назад+6
Good video and its nice to see you back. Stuck in PIO mode sucks 😆 on the subject of Pentium 4. A equally clocked Pentium 3 tualatin is way faster then a Pentium 4 and PC133 SDRAM just add insult to injury. Pentium 4 IPC is way lower then the old P3 and Athlons, so the CPU needed every bit of data available to be efficient and with SDR its not. I would take a P3 or Athlon over a P4 all day long if they are clocked at 75% of the P4 and assuming the P4 has DDR och RAMBUS. The only thing that could make that P4 system any slower is a Celeron, Celeron netburst CPU with PC133, must be painfully slow, it sure was even with DDR266 for my friends budget PC back then 🤣
Simply installing the intel chipset drivers could make a huge difference. Microsoft often supplied outdated but stable drivers to get you going but aren't optimized. The Compaq came with good drivers preinstalled probably. Xp configuration could also impact performance like fixed or variable swap file size, stuff in autostart, virusscanners, when windows updates decides it's time to scan for updates etc.
the only MB where installing chipset drivers was actually doing something was some MB with socket 754 (amd), but generally, I never had to install them on any socket 478 Intel motherboard with Win XP, it was always working fine, I am just installing network, graphics and sound drivers and everything works fine mostly, installing chipset drivers sometimes cause more problems than making it better
The order of driver installation is important. Sometimes Windows will just default to a generic driver and not pick up a better third party one. I think that’s why they tell you to install the driver before plugging in, that way the system can be prepared to load the right driver.
The Pentium 4 PC was effectively running in 'Safe Mode' (no direct disk access performance) due to the chipset drivers not being updated. Probably happened after the motherboard/CPU were upgraded but not the software.
OS performace does vary with an important factor, hard drive speed. Sometimes old hardware may result in lag of program execution and OS loads, so you could check if those parts are doing wrong.
The first reason would be because it's a Pentium 4 But on a more serious note, there might just be something misconfigured. - At first I assume it's actually a Pentium 4 and not a Celeron, because those were cut down like crazy. - Then obviously the amount of background stuff. - Then IDE. Classic PIO mode issues. When the drive doesn't deliver proper data the system will try again. And after 5 trys it will reduce the DMA mode make sure it can get any data at all. Let that happen a couple of times and you're out of DMA modes and back to PIO. The classic fix is to remove the controller in device manager and do a restart. It should then reinstall the controler in it's proper UDMA mode. - The drive might just be on it's way out - And obviously fragmentation - The BIOS reports PC133 memory, which is probably the slowest memory any Pentium 4 could run on and would be a clear bottleneck.
It would also be reasonable to check the hard drive for bad sectors. The built-in disk tools, of course, try to correct and replace such areas, but all this still slows down the disk, with a large number of errors. For such a task, for example, Victoria programs by Sergei Kazansky, Norton Disk Doctor and the like are suitable.
I had a Pentium III 900mhz, kingston 512mb ram, PNY Geforce4 ti 4600, Maxtor 80gb hhd I built in I think 2001 and used all the way till 2006. Even then it was starting to struggle with some games but overall for daily use it was still plenty fast. I think for a while I had it overclocked to 1 or 1.1ghz with the Asus board I had.
You know what got me all pissed off watching this video? It reminded me that last summer, my visiting ex-wife borrowed one of my clean t-shirts (a red Compac shirt from some computer faire in the '90s) to loan to a friend who had gotten all wet in the lake; when I recently asked the friend for my shirt back, she said, "Oh sorry, it got lost...". Moral: Tell my wife I'm going to be traveling the next time she plans to come visit and don't watch videos that mention Compac.
I remember well the disappointment when I had first found out that the higher end PIII was much faster than the lower end P4 cpu's. The one on the left is 1.7ghz. It wasn't till about 2.2ghz that the Pentium 4 started to feel faster. By the time you got to 2.7 or 3ghz, it was much faster.
Simple answer imo is its a willamette, not much faster at the high end than a pentium iii possibly even slower. Even worse if its an sdr equipped machine.
The Pentium 4 era, especially before Prescott was released was a truly forgettable era for Intel. At least the Pentium D made it more tolerable but until the Core 2 came out I was only using AMD at home, and at least got upgraded to a Pentium D for my work machine at the time.
I had an Windows XP Machine, like 10 years ago... And GOSH IT WAS SLOW! It took like 10 minutes to boot, and it was extremely dusty also, since I've got it from a friend for free. (Who had it in like the "industrial site) But hey! I was a kid! I have really nostalgic memories of this PC. I was actually kinda sad, that a PC I bought like 4 years ago was.. well kinda fast, I DIDN'T GET THE AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE! (It is an old school Windows me system)
Is that a PCIe port I see? Consider adding a SATA card for an SSD OS drive, keeping a HDD for Linux boot (e.g., Archlinux32 or Debian). Install a Radeon HD 4670 AGP for graphics, and add a PCI HD 5450 and GT 610 for OpenCL and CUDA support using nvidia 390 drivers. Incorporate a Blu-ray burner via the SATA card and mount it in the front, keeping a DVD burner for booting. Add a PCI USB card and, if possible, mod the BIOS for USB and SATA boot, plus overclocking settings. Replace the CD-ROM with a 5.25” floppy drive and add a ZIP drive alongside. Opt for a Sony 2.88MB floppy drive for backward compatibility or an LS-120/LS-240 if compatible. Use ArchInstall for Archlinux32, setting your mirror(s) without changes during installation and include Python. Max out RAM to 4GB, and consider a Hauppauge PCI TV tuner to turn it into a Linux DVR. /boot on your HDD, all other folders on SSD. Debian may be easier. IDK if they have all the nvidia drivers though. Hmmmm.
are you sure that DMA is on in XP? sometimes it likes to turn off yes the OS has a setting too. i think they fixed this in later updated installers like SP1/SP2/SP3 that and having the drivers installed and checking the bios settings.
that era of compaq pentium 3's were pretty well optimised, I used one as a garage computer up until programs (like chrome) stopped supporting it, did just fine for reading websites and PDF's
A lot of p4 era pcs are having problems due to lower quality capacitors fitted on the mobos, of course they can be replaced cheaply in a few minutes of diy soldering.
That P4 1.7gHz looks like an early Willamette P4. Those were actually slower per clock speed than the P3 due to the long pipelines. If you clock them at the same GHz the P3 would win.
Early Pentium processors were plagued.... the 60 and 66 MHz vintage. Once the Pentium 100 MHz arrived and the corresponding 430 TX chipset, the original Pentium finally got solid. Pentium III got very good when that era completed, 1200 MHz standard, and I had some IBM Servers with 1400 MHz processors. Pentium III chipsets with the 915 chip set was finally solid. The early vintage of Pentium 4 processors were slower than those fastest Pentium III's. Again, it took a few reversions / versions, then Pentium 4's got decent. Maxtor with 7200 rpm spindle speed. That was a pretty good specification. Naaaa.... 845 chipset era was not when Pentium 4 got decent. Intel 945 chipset era would have been much better. In my opinion, too early of a Pentium 4 era to deal with.
A. Pentium 4 is slower than Pentium 3 clock for clock, so if you have a Tualatin 1.4 Ghz in the compaq, it will be very similar to that 1.7Ghz P4. B. The P4 uses PC-133 SDRam, which it was never originally built for. C. the SDRam along with the limited BIOS leads me to believe it's a budget oriented motherboard, which might be limiting the performance too. Basically don't expect miracles, a good, well built Compaq P3 is absolutely not guaranteed to be slower than a budget oriented P4. If the P4 was on a high end motherboard with DDR things might be different.
3MB/s is a good hint what's going on. It's the PIO 0. PIO stands for Programmed Input Output, so the CPU is used to send bytes of data to the device. 0 is the generation, the higher the number, the faster the data can be sent. So PIO0 means "use the CPU to read and write from disk, and do it at the slowest possible rate". Possibly to maintain compatibility and ensure nothing goes terribly wrong. Super unfortunate seeing BIOS applying UltraDMA 5 or 6 and then Windows rolling it back to PIO....
Back in the day I had a Celeron Tualatin 1.2Ghz ocd to 1.34. With 384MB of sdram and a geforce 2 mx 400 later upgraded to FX5200 ultra. But more importantly I had a hardware ISDN modem, hardware sound card, 2 hdds on separate IDE branches(one for os and other for games) and a sharply tuned Windows xp operating system. So people that were buying Pentium 4 computers with like 128MB or 256MBof ram, that used windows ME, one of those dial up pci cards, etc. would not believe I didnt have a pentium 4.
upgrade from MX400 to FX 5200, that was probably pretty bad deal back in the day, even MX440 is faster than any FX5200, only reason to use FX5200 is DX9 support
@@lanelesic No, it didn't have, you remember or wrong or you didn't test it properly, Ti 4200 is much more powerful card than FX5200. Ti 4200 should have like twice raw performance compared to FX5200, but maybe your FX5200 ultra had higher clocks so it was not such a big difference, but even FX5600 is still slower than Ti 4200 in raw performance. Ofcourse it's gonna be better for FX series when you want to run some later games which just need proper DX9 support, but try to compare them in older DX8 games, Ti 4200 is much faster.
@sic Quake is OpenGL game, it can be different, but the vast majority of games run under DirectX and Ti 4200 has double raw performance there. And I don't play with some memories, I actually test a lot of old hardware now, so I know it for sure, even 64bit MX440 is better in raw performance than FX5200, but MX440 is just renamed GeForce 2, so it lacks some features you may need in 2003+ games, it doesn't even have full DX8 support, for example test Nature in 3D Mark 2001 doesn't work on it, but it works on Ti 4200.
Quasi il mio primo pc, avevo il suo successore il cpc 6128, per la cpu puoi provare a vedere se magari aveva qualche piedino ossidato che non faceva ben contatto, quei socket dip alle volte sono traditori 😊. Complimenti per il canale e la preparazione al prossimo video!
HDD sounds like it is dying. I've played around with P4s in recent years and ran Windows 10 on a P4 HT. I have a bunch of P4 hardware. The only P4 I actually use is a 2003 Vaio laptop with a desktop 2.8CPU. It is running the launch version of XP. I really don't use XP much but need it for the Brothers in Arms games. One of these days, I'll figure out how to crack the DRM so I can run them on one of my Windows 7 machines. Windows 7 is a great OS that I never used until recently. it will run all XP games (except those with Starforce or SecuROM) and most 9x games. Sadly, game services are abandoning it. Up until recently, I played a lot of my older Steam games in Windows 7.
One other factor could cause the slowdown: if the read head on the hard drive is starting to fail the hd controler may be writing bad blocks to the platter(s). A lot of that would slow it for sure as the head has to seek more inefficiently.😅
Is "partition alignment" / "partition offset" the possible culprit here? I can't remember which Microsoft OS fixed this by default. Also, I can remember that sometimes having some "auto select" active on harddisk and then "slave" for optical media doesn't always behave. You can try setting "master" for the harddisk and temporarily remove the other drives to see if that makes a difference. Try swapping out the ide cable with the p3 machine as well. Does it have multiple connectors on the cable? Try another one. Does the motherboard have multiple cable headers for the ide cable? are they marked differently? (e.g. "IDE" vs "UDMA" or something like that). Is the (NTFS?) cluster size on the p4 machine way smaller than on the p3 machine?
I always gauge the load time of WinXP by the number of swipes the progress bar makes. My P4 3.4Ghz Cedar Mill does it in 2.5 swipes, same as my Opteron 180. It’s not as old as your P4, so no real surprise. Intel’s application accelerator looks interesting. I’ll give it a go. They clearly had a problem that required a solution.
As far as I remember those days, there sometimes was a key-combination or F-key that sometimes reveals hidden insights/options in the BIOS. Not sure if that's the case with your mobo but it's worth a search and try.
9:12 the HDD clearly is labeled UDMA 133, but UDMA is disabled in BIOS. Should read the motherboard manual to find which UDMA setting in BIOS corresponds to UDMA 133. By the way, if you really use that computer, you should install a $20 256 gb SATA SSD with an $5 PATA to SATA adapter.
Reminds me of the well known problem which I also had back in the day, that your user profile could get too big it you stored a lot of gigs of pictures and music in the default folders. Really annoying, if you're going to use XP and have a lot of data stored, then move the "music" , "photos" etc folders outside your user profile into a different directory.
First thing is, what type of P4 is it? :D There's QUITE bit difference between willamette, northwood and prescott. Also soc 423 vs 478 and sdram vs rdram vs ddr. Willamette on 423 can easily suck behind P3 coppermine (oc) or tualatin. It was mostly thanks to bad socket design (soc 423) and weird motherboard issues/lack of good boards.
i have one of those ShuttleX mini boxes and when i used the same IDE channel for the HDD and Cdrom the transfer speeds and boot times slowed down to a crawl
it is possible that the same principle of single task oparions are quicker on a slower CPU build. where the p4 architecture could of been changed to operate with the chip structure. bug fixes leads to hardware changes (updated CPU architecure)
I never had luck with Maxtor drives. I wonder if you can test it with an old ISO of Seagate Seatools - if you can find it? Those old Windows BIOS update utilities still scare me. Modern ones are OK.
Also I really don't think this is totally a driver issue. When I would work on these PCs in the era, I would of checked hard drive health. Again, especially since it is a Maxtor. Seagate Seatools use to do a good job of drive self tests. I would usually do both short and long drive self tests with Seagate Seatools. Did you check the drive for bad sectors?
I noticed the drive was set master. Should it not be on cable select? The jumper? Also, each computer was running a different Service pack. The P4 was running an older service pack. The P3 was running SP2, I would assume. Good video.
That master vs cable select thing makes absolutely no difference, unless the drives have conflicting settings. Cable select was just introduced to make configuration easier for people that didn't know all that technical jazz.
Oh no... it is the 1,7Ghz 256Kbyte Cache model. Yeah, eh, yeah that is a problem. That is being starved by to little cache! But yes getting out into actually working Ultra DMA, that will do wonders.
Years ago a friend had a similar issue with an awful Packard Bell P4 and it was so bad he gave me the PC. I fixed it simply by uninstalling Norton 360 and it was like a brand new PC heh!
ohy hello fellow dutch dude XD if u are interested in a bunch of pre pentium 4 era laptops lmk. i wanna slim down my collection a tad to make room for newer projects.
Did you ever tried using the drive from the PIII on the P4? Sometimes old hard drives act really weird in which benchmarks may give you good readings, no bad sectors or anything, and still make the "real world" performance really low... xD Cheers!
the first pentium 4 was developed for be used with memory rambus...not with PC133 , the retrocompatibility with PC133 made of pentium 4 an cpu more slow that an pentium 3
you mention that p4 is not good with older osess like windows 98 but the one you have there is likely a Willamette P4 if its running at 1.7ghz. That was released in 2001 so it would have still been in the lifecycle for windows 98 and Xp was only released that year in October.
hmm, i have a mid 2000s advent 'media' pc (a thin flat case slightly bigger than a vcr/dvd player/recorder, has a tv tuner card in it), pentium4 (3.2ghz, i think) thing that seems slow, its not the install as it had no hard drive when i got it, but new xp install seems very sluggish, also when running dos even. memtest shows no problems with memory, cpu doesnt get excessively hot, psu output voltages within tolerance,
Those compac pzza p3 boxes were really fast. I had one with a 1ghz p3 and tnt2 integrated and it outperformed my core2duo laptop with some geforce4mx gpu when playing anarchy online. Though that game was poorly optimized and used a directx that was new with the tnt and p3 but still a funny little machine.
Why did you left UDMA mode disabled in BIOS? My first thought was it was working in PIO or wrong chipset drivers. That was a good and fast HDD for its time. And I always turned PNP OS on for drivers to do their work. It was an early start of PnP but still. And about the CPU... p4 Willamettee core was hated as it was slower than later PIII cores (like Tualatin) per clock.
He left it on Auto and those settings are probably correct. You are right disabling PnP OS is a blunder as it won't install OS drivers for the chip set automatically
@@thedopplereffect00 Yes, you are right about Auto mode, I rewatched it and after User he did returned it to Auto. Then I would definitely blame bad chipset driver but still check HDD with Maxtor HDD tool to be on a safe side (20 years have passed) and always check SMART as it can be helpful to diagnose some problems. I don't know if they are now easily obtainable (as Seagate bought Max) but I have on my machine Maxtor MaxBLAST and PowerMax from 2006.
You think about actually cleaning those PC's before putting them on video? I don't mean like a full strip down. A simple spray and wipe before recording might show an ounce of care.
I wonder what was the actual reason for the low speed? Did windows xp switch ATA transfer mode to PIO without appropriate drivers for the controller?🤔 Anyway thank you for the video!🙂
My first thought when I see such read speeds: the IDE controller is in PIO4 mode instead of UltraDMA. The most common cause of this behavior is using a 40-wire IDE cable instead of a 80-wire one (or bad quality of that cable).
I actually thought the same. I never needed the Application Accelerator in the past. I avoided Intel crapware.
40pin work with dma but only like dma 3, it's 30mbs, so it's not so bad. Yes 80 pin is better, with more modern like p4 or even PIII, but most important is manually check and configure bios. And of course use new or tested and good hdd or ssd for best speed.
And don't forget install latest chipset driver like we so in a video.
PIO was awful. First time I built a computer ever I had a PIO hard disk and the machine came alive with a UDMA drive.
@@_Tualatin_ ATA100 and ATA133, I always used 80pin cables. However they are hard to find nowadays.
Around the 15 minute mark it does show the cable as an 80pin and that ultra dma 5 mode is in use.
My first thought of this was "Pentium 4 Willamette/S432 with PC133 Memory".
And it indeed is using PC-133 memory, which the P4 really doesn't like.
And making it faster is practical with a more modern Board, Single Channel DDR-SDRAM at bare minimum, Dual Channel (i865PE) recommended.
That is what I went with on an ABIT AS8 motherboard (i865PE) and DDR dual channel 2x1GB 3200 rated? I forget now. Pentium 4 640 Prescott. Pretty good hybrid system with AGP 8x support. Never had the chance to try it with an SSD drive though.
SDRAM slows down the P4, but nothing like _that._ You wouldn't notice in everyday use. It's a bottleneck, but it isn't crippling.
Windows XP on an SSD moves like it's bathed in Crisco, going downhill on a Slip n' Slide. I remember the first boot on an SSD. The XP Pro loading screen had the chance to move the blue dots about 2/3rds of a trip from left to right before the screen blanked and went to the desktop. It does depend on what else you have (physically) installed, and what drivers you have loaded, as some hardware just takes a moment to initialize. In that case it doesn't matter how fast your storage, RAM, or CPU are.
@@nickwallette6201 I have an SSD in my older ASUS TUSL2-C board with Pentium 3 1400S and 512MB SDRAM. That machine is as quick and responsive as my modern systems, albeit using Windows 98SE and older period correct software etc.
@@nickwallette6201 indeed. As I remember - the first question about P4 PC performance was its memory type. But SDRAM with P4 only meant P4 would not be much faster than P3, not slower because P3 had the same SDRAM anyway.
Even with RD ram the P4 1.5 was only _slightly_ faster than the Coppermine 1ghz. It was pretty bad. And sometimes even slower. Only in things like Quake 3 and optimised applications like MP3 compression was that 1.5 able to outrun the P3. Putting that 1.5 on SDram in fact makes it _slower_ than a coppermine 1ghz machine. Its really sad how bad early P4's were. Northwood hyperthreading P4's were a pretty decent chip though.
The Case is a Compucase made (7106), sold by Aopen.
Those are prety nice for ATX Desktop Rigs...
makes you wonder if the Pentium 3 system could have been sped up like the Pentium 4 system due to it also having software and driver problems.🤔🤔
Yes, Pentium 3 systems went to up to 1,5GHz or thereabout, but those Chips are pretty rare (Tualatin). And you need a compatible Chipset (or mod your board) as well. @@SaraMorgan-ym6ue
what is that 2000 era case called with green triangular downfacing power button and all textured with downfacing triangles?
Pentium 4 was the reason that AMD came into the match from around 1999-2012.
At the same time Intel was failing with long pipelines and high clock rates in 32 bit Netburst, AMD developed the 64 bit architecture that both AMD and Intel are using to this day. Prior implementations of 64 bit (including Intel's ill-fated Itanium) all had major disadvantages preventing PC, workstation, and low-end server adoption. Not only can an OS running in AMD64 "long mode" still run 32-bit programs, but the way the instruction set is designed, 64 bit programs can and frequently do use 32 bit instructions for performance. They have to use 64 bit pointers, but that performance hit is offset by the gains from the instruction pointer relative address mode AMD added.
More like 1999 - 2006. Core 2 Duo rekt every competition, then there was Core i series. Thankfully we have Ryzen now.
Amd has always been in the game
Yeah. Pentium 4s were space heaters and slow per MHz. Most of us that built systems - built AMD Athlon.
amd was always there :)
Defragging the hard drive as well as defragging system files offline (hibernation file, page file, MFT file, and registry hives) can also have a significant impact on performance, especially with a system installed in an HDD
Davy, I am so glad you are back. Thanks for taking us along as you solved this, it was a great watch! And to think that machine might have spent a good portion of its life being so misconfigured, how unfortunate! Glad you fixed it up :)
Does Davy got his locker named Jones ;)
@@adventureoflinkmk2 not sure, but he makes great retro content!
@@RetroTechChris yea... he does. :)
Par for the course, fresh OS install - doesn't matter if its a Celeron or a 3.8Ghz Extreme Edition, give it a few weeks, it'll be grinding, shovelling and displacing bits and bytes like a gaggle of lethargic road sweepers.
Of course, it is a Pentium 4 after all 🙂I'm amazed on how slow the system in a top noth Northwood could be, even with an SSD ^^
@@polaxis842 The P4 wasn't that slow.
Initially, the S423 ones weren't a great deal faster than the highest-performance Tualatin P-IIIs of the time, but those were also _really_ expensive, and never got cheap enough to be a value buy. The P4 came into its own when the clock speeds got higher. Once you got to 1.8GHz, they were worth jumping to from a Pentium III.
The other problem was memory. Since Intel had to go through that messy divorce with RAMBUS, we had to wait far too long for proper DDR support. When you're stuck between expensive and clunky RDRAM and SDRAM, you're not doing the P4 CPU and Northbridge chipset any favors.
Those two factors gave the P4 a bad rep that they never completely recovered from, but a Northwood with DDR performs quite well. Once you got _too_ far into the later P4s, we bumped into the practical limit on clock speed, and it was clear the whole architecture had no future. But, in its sweet spot, the P4 was still a fine performer.
I had a colleague at work, at the time, who was a die-hard Athlon XP fan. When the Northwoods showed up on store shelves, he switched teams -- dubiously, but curious how far he could push them with overclocking. He got a 1.8GHz chip up to 3GHz with no trouble at all, and it ran circles around the AMD rig he was using. He flipped to Intel overnight.
Not to talk smack about AMD. I think Intel would've languished without them. I just don't think it's fair to crap on the P4. I will absolutely admit, though, that the Core and Core 2 line made it clear that the P4 was a design mistake. Still, my Windows XP rig to this day is a Northwood 2.0GHz on an Abit IC7-G with 2GB DDR, and a pair of Seagate Barracuda SATA drives in RAID-0. It's _plenty_ snappy. I just wish you could still find a working Radeon 9700 Pro to compete the quintessential Blue Team build of the day. Alas, the GPUs are fundamentally flawed in the same way the Xbox 360 and PS3 Gen 1 CPUs were. RIP.
@@polaxis842 I have an Asrock P4i65g and ran it with a Prescott 3.4 and a Northwood 3.0 with Win 7 on an SSD. It previously ran XP on a HDD. It ran pretty well, though I didn't do benchmarks. Decided to retire it and got an Asrock 775i65pe and Pentium D 950 with Win 10 1511. It too runs quite well for its age.
@@alexanderangelov230 That is quite some oldschool hardware in the meantime 🙂 From my experience: It did run Windows + Office + games from the same time period very well. But even for browsing, the CPU was heavily on edge :)
@@polaxis842 Of course Pentium has nothing on Core. But that was my first pc, a budget one, from 2005, and it came with a Celeron 2.4. The Pentium was a welcome upgrade.
My thoughts on Pentium 4 systems are that they are excellent for early to mid 2000s gaming.
They are commonly overlooked as a retro PC. I have a Win98SE PC with a P4 and it absolutely flies with no bottlenecks :-)
I could be many things. Caps may look fine from outside but they may be losing capacitace or some voltage regulator maybe running too hot or some IC/option is holding system back. Even a bad power supply can perform a slowness role.
When you said ~3MB/s transfers, my mind screamed DMA is off in Device Manager. Over 10 years ago, I had XP installed on a system like these. The HDD unfortunatelly was about to die.... some bad sectors or perhaps a range of bad sectors. I noticed that XP autoswitched from DMA on to off and the system became pretty slow like this video showed.
Cables sometimes can make things harder when we push the cable and not the thin black plastic. One wire broken is what's needed to make a bad cable.
For anyone wonder how to check the mode, open Device Manager. Go to IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Then right click Primary IDE Channel and select Properties. Then in the window that pops up go to the Advanced Settings Tab. It'll show the current transfer mode there.
I've had a similar issue with my x40 before that was likely related to a failing drive where it'd fall back into PIO mode occasionally and the solution was to uninstall the IDE controller device and restart and let it reinstall it.
I totally agree, bus gone to PIO mode probably, so driver reinstallation of that bus always should fix the problem.
@@aleksa1987
Not necessarily. Going back to Device Manager and check if DMA is set "if available" under ATA/ATAPI controllers/Primary channel. Deleting the Primary Channel and say yes to restart, should reinstall that devie and enumerate the hdds there connected.
That means PATA I/O errors occurred. Usually a bad PATA cable connection.
this makes me remember when i had a core 2 duo setup and my usb transfer speeds were like TOTAL TRASH and some dongles i used didn't work at all, and at the end i noticed that in the bios the ports were setup as usb 1.0 instead of 2.0
Hmm. I was expecting this to be about the CPU being slow, given the title. A disk being slow could happen on any computer. But, still, it was an interesting dive into the system, and interesting how much difference the drivers made.
That seems much less the case today.
In my experience, systems that have 3 RAM slots were generally designed with the capability to overclock the chipset if you only occupied 2 of the RAM slots. The board traces were too long to overclock with the 3rd slot occupied.
Your mileage may vary, possibly significantly, because my experience was from a totally different motherboard.
Still, there was a reason for 3 RAM slot systems back in the day, and it was usually a choice of running the chipset overclocked with only 2 slots occupied, or running the chipset at stock speed with all 3 slots occupied.
Compaq, overclocked ? why you say that ???
new here ???
@@lucasrem My username on other services is literally over_clox, so no, I'm most definitely not new to the scene. Probably newer to this channel though if that's what you meant.
@@lucasrem Also, I think the system I was referring to was an early ASUS board from 2003, but I kinda forget now.
Regardless, there were some unique design decisions made with systems that had an odd number of memory slots.
Your videos are made very well. Clear and easy to follow. Thank you
Good video and its nice to see you back.
Stuck in PIO mode sucks 😆
on the subject of Pentium 4.
A equally clocked Pentium 3 tualatin is way faster then a Pentium 4 and PC133 SDRAM just add insult to injury.
Pentium 4 IPC is way lower then the old P3 and Athlons, so the CPU needed every bit of data available to be efficient and with SDR its not.
I would take a P3 or Athlon over a P4 all day long if they are clocked at 75% of the P4 and assuming the P4 has DDR och RAMBUS.
The only thing that could make that P4 system any slower is a Celeron, Celeron netburst CPU with PC133, must be painfully slow, it sure was even with DDR266 for my friends budget PC back then 🤣
Pentium 4 has a longer Pipeline for a process, although it has a greater overall clockspeed.
Simply installing the intel chipset drivers could make a huge difference. Microsoft often supplied outdated but stable drivers to get you going but aren't optimized. The Compaq came with good drivers preinstalled probably.
Xp configuration could also impact performance like fixed or variable swap file size, stuff in autostart, virusscanners, when windows updates decides it's time to scan for updates etc.
the only MB where installing chipset drivers was actually doing something was some MB with socket 754 (amd), but generally, I never had to install them on any socket 478 Intel motherboard with Win XP, it was always working fine, I am just installing network, graphics and sound drivers and everything works fine mostly, installing chipset drivers sometimes cause more problems than making it better
The order of driver installation is important. Sometimes Windows will just default to a generic driver and not pick up a better third party one. I think that’s why they tell you to install the driver before plugging in, that way the system can be prepared to load the right driver.
Nice review & good tips...well done!
The Pentium 4 PC was effectively running in 'Safe Mode' (no direct disk access performance) due to the chipset drivers not being updated. Probably happened after the motherboard/CPU were upgraded but not the software.
The design of that compaq is fantastic
OS performace does vary with an important factor, hard drive speed. Sometimes old hardware may result in lag of program execution and OS loads, so you could check if those parts are doing wrong.
The first reason would be because it's a Pentium 4
But on a more serious note, there might just be something misconfigured.
- At first I assume it's actually a Pentium 4 and not a Celeron, because those were cut down like crazy.
- Then obviously the amount of background stuff.
- Then IDE. Classic PIO mode issues. When the drive doesn't deliver proper data the system will try again. And after 5 trys it will reduce the DMA mode make sure it can get any data at all. Let that happen a couple of times and you're out of DMA modes and back to PIO. The classic fix is to remove the controller in device manager and do a restart. It should then reinstall the controler in it's proper UDMA mode.
- The drive might just be on it's way out
- And obviously fragmentation
- The BIOS reports PC133 memory, which is probably the slowest memory any Pentium 4 could run on and would be a clear bottleneck.
I wonder why the BIOS option "PnP Operating System" i set to NO.
I used to set yes if the system was Windows.
That is a very snappy Pentium 3!
I guess sometimes it is worth it to install the chipset drivers and update the BIOS on these old machines
Maybe it's fragmentation? I would defragment both machines just in case.
Disks are best checked with the Victoria HDD Info program which is in the bootable Hirens Boot CD.
It would also be reasonable to check the hard drive for bad sectors. The built-in disk tools, of course, try to correct and replace such areas, but all this still slows down the disk, with a large number of errors.
For such a task, for example, Victoria programs by Sergei Kazansky, Norton Disk Doctor and the like are suitable.
I had a Pentium III 900mhz, kingston 512mb ram, PNY Geforce4 ti 4600, Maxtor 80gb hhd I built in I think 2001 and used all the way till 2006. Even then it was starting to struggle with some games but overall for daily use it was still plenty fast. I think for a while I had it overclocked to 1 or 1.1ghz with the Asus board I had.
You know what got me all pissed off watching this video? It reminded me that last summer, my visiting ex-wife borrowed one of my clean t-shirts (a red Compac shirt from some computer faire in the '90s) to loan to a friend who had gotten all wet in the lake; when I recently asked the friend for my shirt back, she said, "Oh sorry, it got lost...". Moral: Tell my wife I'm going to be traveling the next time she plans to come visit and don't watch videos that mention Compac.
Didn't see drive controller settings in Device Manager. Could be configured wrong.
I remember well the disappointment when I had first found out that the higher end PIII was much faster than the lower end P4 cpu's. The one on the left is 1.7ghz. It wasn't till about 2.2ghz that the Pentium 4 started to feel faster. By the time you got to 2.7 or 3ghz, it was much faster.
Simple answer imo is its a willamette, not much faster at the high end than a pentium iii possibly even slower. Even worse if its an sdr equipped machine.
The Pentium 4 era, especially before Prescott was released was a truly forgettable era for Intel. At least the Pentium D made it more tolerable but until the Core 2 came out I was only using AMD at home, and at least got upgraded to a Pentium D for my work machine at the time.
I had an Windows XP Machine, like 10 years ago... And GOSH IT WAS SLOW! It took like 10 minutes to boot, and it was extremely dusty also, since I've got it from a friend for free. (Who had it in like the "industrial site) But hey! I was a kid! I have really nostalgic memories of this PC. I was actually kinda sad, that a PC I bought like 4 years ago was.. well kinda fast, I DIDN'T GET THE AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE! (It is an old school Windows me system)
8:11 I would play with the cables for a while to hide them, it is so fun to make them look somewhat in order lol
Is that a PCIe port I see? Consider adding a SATA card for an SSD OS drive, keeping a HDD for Linux boot (e.g., Archlinux32 or Debian). Install a Radeon HD 4670 AGP for graphics, and add a PCI HD 5450 and GT 610 for OpenCL and CUDA support using nvidia 390 drivers. Incorporate a Blu-ray burner via the SATA card and mount it in the front, keeping a DVD burner for booting. Add a PCI USB card and, if possible, mod the BIOS for USB and SATA boot, plus overclocking settings. Replace the CD-ROM with a 5.25” floppy drive and add a ZIP drive alongside. Opt for a Sony 2.88MB floppy drive for backward compatibility or an LS-120/LS-240 if compatible. Use ArchInstall for Archlinux32, setting your mirror(s) without changes during installation and include Python. Max out RAM to 4GB, and consider a Hauppauge PCI TV tuner to turn it into a Linux DVR. /boot on your HDD, all other folders on SSD. Debian may be easier. IDK if they have all the nvidia drivers though. Hmmmm.
are you sure that DMA is on in XP? sometimes it likes to turn off yes the OS has a setting too. i think they fixed this in later updated installers like SP1/SP2/SP3 that and having the drivers installed and checking the bios settings.
If those tests show transfer rate about 60MB/s, UDMA has to be active. PIO would be 3MB/s max like in first run.
that era of compaq pentium 3's were pretty well optimised, I used one as a garage computer up until programs (like chrome) stopped supporting it, did just fine for reading websites and PDF's
A lot of p4 era pcs are having problems due to lower quality capacitors fitted on the mobos, of course they can be replaced cheaply in a few minutes of diy soldering.
nice system video shows them going and the inside also
That P4 1.7gHz looks like an early Willamette P4. Those were actually slower per clock speed than the P3 due to the long pipelines. If you clock them at the same GHz the P3 would win.
I have that Pentium 3 Compaq Deskpro, plastic is still white and in very good condition
Early Pentium processors were plagued.... the 60 and 66 MHz vintage. Once the Pentium 100 MHz arrived and the corresponding 430 TX chipset, the original Pentium finally got solid. Pentium III got very good when that era completed, 1200 MHz standard, and I had some IBM Servers with 1400 MHz processors. Pentium III chipsets with the 915 chip set was finally solid. The early vintage of Pentium 4 processors were slower than those fastest Pentium III's. Again, it took a few reversions / versions, then Pentium 4's got decent.
Maxtor with 7200 rpm spindle speed. That was a pretty good specification.
Naaaa.... 845 chipset era was not when Pentium 4 got decent. Intel 945 chipset era would have been much better. In my opinion, too early of a Pentium 4 era to deal with.
A. Pentium 4 is slower than Pentium 3 clock for clock, so if you have a Tualatin 1.4 Ghz in the compaq, it will be very similar to that 1.7Ghz P4.
B. The P4 uses PC-133 SDRam, which it was never originally built for.
C. the SDRam along with the limited BIOS leads me to believe it's a budget oriented motherboard, which might be limiting the performance too.
Basically don't expect miracles, a good, well built Compaq P3 is absolutely not guaranteed to be slower than a budget oriented P4. If the P4 was on a high end motherboard with DDR things might be different.
SDRAM was limit of the first 845 chipset due to Intels relation with Rambus.
a 1.4GHz Tualatin is *way* faster than a 1.7GHz Willamette.
P4 with 256 cache and 400 MHz bus + SDR memory = extraordinary garbage. Thou, I'm glad that playing with drivers helped a bit.
Glad I was on Duron and Athlon at this time.
I missed that hard drive sounds when opening up program's
The first Pentium 4's really stunk.
The late Pentium 3s, especially certain models like the cumine 800 were really good for some odd reason.
The P4 was a slug from the get go. That’s why Intel eventually abandoned it and went back to the P3 design for the Core series CPUs.
Iirc, M/Core was a hybrid and also an evolution from both. They took the best parts of both and tweaked it significantly.
what is memory speed on both and what is the front side bus on the compaq? just curious
3MB/s is a good hint what's going on. It's the PIO 0. PIO stands for Programmed Input Output, so the CPU is used to send bytes of data to the device. 0 is the generation, the higher the number, the faster the data can be sent. So PIO0 means "use the CPU to read and write from disk, and do it at the slowest possible rate". Possibly to maintain compatibility and ensure nothing goes terribly wrong.
Super unfortunate seeing BIOS applying UltraDMA 5 or 6 and then Windows rolling it back to PIO....
Was looking for this comment. PIO-0 maximum is 3.3 MB/sec, which is in line with what he's getting.
Back in the day I had a Celeron Tualatin 1.2Ghz ocd to 1.34. With 384MB of sdram and a geforce 2 mx 400 later upgraded to FX5200 ultra.
But more importantly I had a hardware ISDN modem, hardware sound card, 2 hdds on separate IDE branches(one for os and other for games) and a sharply tuned Windows xp operating system.
So people that were buying Pentium 4 computers with like 128MB or 256MBof ram, that used windows ME, one of those dial up pci cards, etc. would not believe I didnt have a pentium 4.
upgrade from MX400 to FX 5200, that was probably pretty bad deal back in the day, even MX440 is faster than any FX5200, only reason to use FX5200 is DX9 support
Fx5200 was around the raw performance of a geforce 4 ti 4200@@Pidalin
@@lanelesic No, it didn't have, you remember or wrong or you didn't test it properly, Ti 4200 is much more powerful card than FX5200. Ti 4200 should have like twice raw performance compared to FX5200, but maybe your FX5200 ultra had higher clocks so it was not such a big difference, but even FX5600 is still slower than Ti 4200 in raw performance. Ofcourse it's gonna be better for FX series when you want to run some later games which just need proper DX9 support, but try to compare them in older DX8 games, Ti 4200 is much faster.
@@Pidalin ROFL look up some Quake 3 fps charts
@sic Quake is OpenGL game, it can be different, but the vast majority of games run under DirectX and Ti 4200 has double raw performance there.
And I don't play with some memories, I actually test a lot of old hardware now, so I know it for sure, even 64bit MX440 is better in raw performance than FX5200, but MX440 is just renamed GeForce 2, so it lacks some features you may need in 2003+ games, it doesn't even have full DX8 support, for example test Nature in 3D Mark 2001 doesn't work on it, but it works on Ti 4200.
Quasi il mio primo pc, avevo il suo successore il cpc 6128, per la cpu puoi provare a vedere se magari aveva qualche piedino ossidato che non faceva ben contatto, quei socket dip alle volte sono traditori 😊. Complimenti per il canale e la preparazione al prossimo video!
HDD sounds like it is dying. I've played around with P4s in recent years and ran Windows 10 on a P4 HT. I have a bunch of P4 hardware. The only P4 I actually use is a 2003 Vaio laptop with a desktop 2.8CPU. It is running the launch version of XP. I really don't use XP much but need it for the Brothers in Arms games. One of these days, I'll figure out how to crack the DRM so I can run them on one of my Windows 7 machines. Windows 7 is a great OS that I never used until recently. it will run all XP games (except those with Starforce or SecuROM) and most 9x games. Sadly, game services are abandoning it. Up until recently, I played a lot of my older Steam games in Windows 7.
One other factor could cause the slowdown: if the read head on the hard drive is starting to fail the hd controler may be writing bad blocks to the platter(s). A lot of that would slow it for sure as the head has to seek more inefficiently.😅
Is "partition alignment" / "partition offset" the possible culprit here? I can't remember which Microsoft OS fixed this by default. Also, I can remember that sometimes having some "auto select" active on harddisk and then "slave" for optical media doesn't always behave. You can try setting "master" for the harddisk and temporarily remove the other drives to see if that makes a difference. Try swapping out the ide cable with the p3 machine as well. Does it have multiple connectors on the cable? Try another one. Does the motherboard have multiple cable headers for the ide cable? are they marked differently? (e.g. "IDE" vs "UDMA" or something like that). Is the (NTFS?) cluster size on the p4 machine way smaller than on the p3 machine?
I've had a Willamette P4 with 1.5GHz and 256MB PC-133 RAM. It was not a great time.
I always gauge the load time of WinXP by the number of swipes the progress bar makes. My P4 3.4Ghz Cedar Mill does it in 2.5 swipes, same as my Opteron 180. It’s not as old as your P4, so no real surprise. Intel’s application accelerator looks interesting. I’ll give it a go. They clearly had a problem that required a solution.
There was a update for windows xp to add support for the pentium 4
The Pentium 4 first came out in 2000, whereas Windows XP didn't come out until 2001.
As far as I remember those days, there sometimes was a key-combination or F-key that sometimes reveals hidden insights/options in the BIOS. Not sure if that's the case with your mobo but it's worth a search and try.
Yes, it is CTRL+F1
You may want to reflash the bios even if its the same version, because of bit rot.
9:12 the HDD clearly is labeled UDMA 133, but UDMA is disabled in BIOS. Should read the motherboard manual to find which UDMA setting in BIOS corresponds to UDMA 133.
By the way, if you really use that computer, you should install a $20 256 gb SATA SSD with an $5 PATA to SATA adapter.
I see no thermal paste at 11:24. Was it there? That could also be why the P4 is slow. Could be thermal throttling.
Reminds me of the well known problem which I also had back in the day, that your user profile could get too big it you stored a lot of gigs of pictures and music in the default folders. Really annoying, if you're going to use XP and have a lot of data stored, then move the "music" , "photos" etc folders outside your user profile into a different directory.
That will do nothing
5:48 Plug & Play O/S is set to No. It needs to be Yes. XP is a PnP OS.
17 ms looks like a 7K RPM HDD with AAM enabled. AAM off should get it down to 12-13 ms.
I have an IBM Thinkcenter P-4, 4 gigs of ram and a 256 gig SSD. It’s running LXDE Linux and it’s very slow.
well first off i would turn on dma mode second i would defrag then install chip set driver and if the problem didnt go away replace hdd
First thing is, what type of P4 is it? :D There's QUITE bit difference between willamette, northwood and prescott. Also soc 423 vs 478 and sdram vs rdram vs ddr.
Willamette on 423 can easily suck behind P3 coppermine (oc) or tualatin. It was mostly thanks to bad socket design (soc 423) and weird motherboard issues/lack of good boards.
i have one of those ShuttleX mini boxes and when i used the same IDE channel for the HDD and Cdrom the transfer speeds and boot times slowed down to a crawl
um, i see norton on the 4 and not on the 3?....when comparing 2 pc's, you should do so with a completely clean install of the OS on BOTH computers....
it is possible that the same principle of single task oparions are quicker on a slower CPU build. where the p4 architecture could of been changed to operate with the chip structure. bug fixes leads to hardware changes (updated CPU architecure)
Did you forget to enable plug and play OS in the BIOS?
I never had luck with Maxtor drives. I wonder if you can test it with an old ISO of Seagate Seatools - if you can find it?
Those old Windows BIOS update utilities still scare me. Modern ones are OK.
Also I really don't think this is totally a driver issue. When I would work on these PCs in the era, I would of checked hard drive health. Again, especially since it is a Maxtor. Seagate Seatools use to do a good job of drive self tests. I would usually do both short and long drive self tests with Seagate Seatools.
Did you check the drive for bad sectors?
Likewise, my chubby HP PC I got 2 years ago, with a Tualatin Celeron CPU, was super slow when it came to running Windows XP.
I noticed the drive was set master. Should it not be on cable select? The jumper? Also, each computer was running a different Service pack. The P4 was running an older service pack. The P3 was running SP2, I would assume. Good video.
That master vs cable select thing makes absolutely no difference, unless the drives have conflicting settings. Cable select was just introduced to make configuration easier for people that didn't know all that technical jazz.
Oh no... it is the 1,7Ghz 256Kbyte Cache model. Yeah, eh, yeah that is a problem. That is being starved by to little cache!
But yes getting out into actually working Ultra DMA, that will do wonders.
Years ago a friend had a similar issue with an awful Packard Bell P4 and it was so bad he gave me the PC. I fixed it simply by uninstalling Norton 360 and it was like a brand new PC heh!
Why are there two chapters titled ""The Exterior" in the video (6:54 & 7:42)? It looks like the second one should be titled "The Interior."
ohy hello fellow dutch dude XD
if u are interested in a bunch of pre pentium 4 era laptops lmk. i wanna slim down my collection a tad to make room for newer projects.
Did you ever tried using the drive from the PIII on the P4? Sometimes old hard drives act really weird in which benchmarks may give you good readings, no bad sectors or anything, and still make the "real world" performance really low... xD Cheers!
the first pentium 4 was developed for be used with memory rambus...not with PC133 , the retrocompatibility with PC133 made of pentium 4 an cpu more slow that an pentium 3
Which hardware fits every PC?
Oh it was driver issue. Shocking. Who would have thought.
you mention that p4 is not good with older osess like windows 98 but the one you have there is likely a Willamette P4 if its running at 1.7ghz. That was released in 2001 so it would have still been in the lifecycle for windows 98 and Xp was only released that year in October.
I hear where windows is physically located on the hard drive matters a lot.
that is why the core series were baised off the p3 not net burst
P6 microarchiteture are better than Netburst, and also less pipelines.
hmm, i have a mid 2000s advent 'media' pc (a thin flat case slightly bigger than a vcr/dvd player/recorder, has a tv tuner card in it), pentium4 (3.2ghz, i think) thing that seems slow, its not the install as it had no hard drive when i got it, but new xp install seems very sluggish, also when running dos even. memtest shows no problems with memory, cpu doesnt get excessively hot, psu output voltages within tolerance,
Those compac pzza p3 boxes were really fast. I had one with a 1ghz p3 and tnt2 integrated and it outperformed my core2duo laptop with some geforce4mx gpu when playing anarchy online. Though that game was poorly optimized and used a directx that was new with the tnt and p3 but still a funny little machine.
Why did you left UDMA mode disabled in BIOS? My first thought was it was working in PIO or wrong chipset drivers. That was a good and fast HDD for its time. And I always turned PNP OS on for drivers to do their work. It was an early start of PnP but still.
And about the CPU... p4 Willamettee core was hated as it was slower than later PIII cores (like Tualatin) per clock.
He left it on Auto and those settings are probably correct. You are right disabling PnP OS is a blunder as it won't install OS drivers for the chip set automatically
@@thedopplereffect00 Yes, you are right about Auto mode, I rewatched it and after User he did returned it to Auto. Then I would definitely blame bad chipset driver but still check HDD with Maxtor HDD tool to be on a safe side (20 years have passed) and always check SMART as it can be helpful to diagnose some problems. I don't know if they are now easily obtainable (as Seagate bought Max) but I have on my machine Maxtor MaxBLAST and PowerMax from 2006.
You think about actually cleaning those PC's before putting them on video? I don't mean like a full strip down. A simple spray and wipe before recording might show an ounce of care.
I wonder what was the actual reason for the low speed? Did windows xp switch ATA transfer mode to PIO without appropriate drivers for the controller?🤔
Anyway thank you for the video!🙂
In the game of booting speeds whoever gets the SSD wins.
Check BIOS settings...
Did you try to defrag the disk? :P
It's always been that speed it just seems a lot slower because of i7's
the p4 is a willamate 400 not a northwood 533 as it will help also with more ram would help
Win2K Pro FTW = Thé OS for this Gen. (my HOT gal Thunderbird 1400MHz, too)