HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

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gamebox
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HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by gamebox » Mon Oct 06, 2014 7:33 pm

Hello, it's me again. :)

After experimenting with lots of old hardware to set up a secondary PC for my parrents, I came into posession of an Intel mobo with decent enough performance. It is GA-8i848P-G. It came with Prescott Celeron 2.4 (18x133) CPU I plan to replace. I tried with 2GHz Pentium 4-M (being very energy-efficient @ 32W TDP), but it booted up as "Xeon 12x1000", and gave me some problems with cooler attachment as the mobo is bent around CPU (probably because of heat or age). The board also doesn't officially support it even with latest BIOS.

Now I'm planning to buy another second-hand CPU and I'm choosing between two Northwood Pentium 4's. Should I go for 2.4 GHz CPU (512k L2 cache, 533 MHz, DDR1 @ 333 MHz, 59 W TDP) or 2.6-2.8 GHz (512k L2 cache, 800 MHz, DDR1 @ 400 MHz, HyperThreading, 66 W TDP)? How important is the HT for internet use (Flash, Youtube, etc.), and is it worth another 7-8 W of consumption? The Celeron with 533 MHz FSB, 2.4 (18x133) GHz, was already fast enough to decode Youtube in realtime @ up to 360p (the current internet bandwith is 1.5 Mbits/sec). The GPU doesn't support hardware H264 decoding.

Thanks. :)

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by CA_Steve » Mon Oct 06, 2014 7:57 pm

I feel like we've hit the wayback button on the time machine....

Just wondering if there is a PC recycling place near you...chances are you can find something from this decade that's more power efficient and can just use the integrated graphics for the video acceleration.

For grins, here's a comparison of the P4 660 to a 10W J1900 Baytrail.

edh
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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by edh » Tue Oct 07, 2014 12:14 am

Unless you're able to get this hardware for free, don't bother with the upgrade. Paying money for hardware that age is a waste of money as you can find entire computers going free that are only 5 years old.

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by quest_for_silence » Tue Oct 07, 2014 2:50 am

CA_Steve wrote:For grins, here's a comparison of the P4 660 to a 10W J1900 Baytrail.
Uhm... Anandtech is down since several hours...

Vicotnik
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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by Vicotnik » Tue Oct 07, 2014 3:03 am

Of the CPUs suggested I'd go with the fastest Northwood. But like the others have pointed out; ancient hardware with horrible performance and high power consumption. Probably nowhere near silent as well. As a nostalgia hobby project with stuff found in the dumpster, sure. Especially if you can make it work with that Pentium 4-M. But spending money upgrading such a system is madness.

Have you looked at stuff like the Raspberry Pi? Perhaps not that well suited for the stuff you want to get done but take a serious look at the very low end of today before you spend money on the mainstream stuff of the ancient past.
quest_for_silence wrote:
CA_Steve wrote:For grins, here's a comparison of the P4 660 to a 10W J1900 Baytrail.
Uhm... Anandtech is down since several hours...
Seems to work for me.

Code: Select all

ping -c 4 www.anandtech.com
PING www.anandtech.com (192.65.241.100) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from www.anandtech.com (192.65.241.100): icmp_seq=1 ttl=113 time=157 ms
64 bytes from www.anandtech.com (192.65.241.100): icmp_seq=2 ttl=113 time=156 ms
64 bytes from www.anandtech.com (192.65.241.100): icmp_seq=3 ttl=113 time=153 ms
64 bytes from www.anandtech.com (192.65.241.100): icmp_seq=4 ttl=113 time=161 ms

--- www.anandtech.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 153.074/156.999/161.289/2.946 ms

gamebox
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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by gamebox » Tue Oct 07, 2014 5:06 am

Yes, I know it is ancient hardware. Yes, I got it for free. It costed me only about 1 euro for replacement condensers I fitted myself (5 of them supplying the CPU). The Pentium 4-M was paid, but only about 2 euros shipped, and I'm planning to resell it again as I sadly can't get it going. The Northwoods I'm choosing now are being sold for about 4 euros.

The purpose of the whole unhappy adventure is to create a desktop for my parents but to minimize the damage along the way (therefore I want the Prescott Celeron to go). They basically need another TOY, as they have too much time to pointlessly waste in their lives and a good old telly (even with cable) and Nintendo-clone video games don't cut it anymore (yes, they play them, even more than I ever did). No, unfortunatelly, they don't know how to give some meaning to their lives, nor they are even trying to. I need my desktop a lot as it is the only way I use the Internet and I browse a lot of subjects of interest on Wikipedia, forums, and the like, and besides it is often busy even when I'm not at home - downloading, encoding to test new video compression options/codecs/filters, optimizing and compressing images and data I wish to keep, etc.

I am truly in love with AMDs when it comes to desktops of that era. I knew nothing about Intels (except that they sucked in mid 2000s real bad), but I Googled up and down and came to know some terms and understand how things are going. The only thing left to comprehend is the famous "Hyper threading", as I really don't know how important it is and how much it can help with Flash and Youtube (which will be fully software-crunched in that machine). So, the main point is - is Hyper Threading on Northwoods worth 10-15% extra Watts of electricity, extra heat, and extra load on the power supply, as all other things between those CPUs ( 2.4/2.6/2.8 ) are pretty equal (bigger GHz numbers don't mean much on Intels from that period anyway)?

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by washu » Tue Oct 07, 2014 5:59 am

To answer your basic question, HT or no HT: you would have to test. A modern version of Flash will attempt to use HT (as it appears to be a 2nd core) but it may not actually benefit. Old HT on P4s is much less efficient than on modern CPUs. Running the "wrong" code on the HT core can slow down the main one, but run the "right" code and the overall throughput can go up. Again, try it both ways.

As for which CPU:
- At the same clock Northwoods will be better than Prescots
- MHz does matter. The gains are small but still there so go with the highest clock.
- FSB:RAM ratio is important. A 533 MHz bus with 333 MHz RAM is bad as the divider is not even. The 800 MHz bus with 400 MHz RAM is much better.

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by Vicotnik » Tue Oct 07, 2014 6:03 am

gamebox wrote:I am truly in love with AMDs when it comes to desktops of that era. I knew nothing about Intels (except that they sucked in mid 2000s real bad), but I Googled up and down and came to know some terms and understand how things are going. The only thing left to comprehend is the famous "Hyper threading", as I really don't know how important it is and how much it can help with Flash and Youtube (which will be fully software-crunched in that machine). So, the main point is - is Hyper Threading on Northwoods worth 10-15% extra Watts of electricity, extra heat, and extra load on the power supply, as all other things between those CPUs ( 2.4/2.6/2.8 ) are pretty equal (bigger GHz numbers don't mean much on Intels from that period anyway)?
I hear you. I went from Intel Tualatin Celeron to AMD Thoroughbred B. Didn't like Netburst at all. :)

The small difference in TDP will not make much of a difference. I'm thinking the system will be slow so you might just as well go with the faster CPU, since they are practically the same. Not primarily for HT, but also for the slightly higher clock, higher bus speed etc.

gamebox
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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by gamebox » Wed Oct 08, 2014 8:20 am

You guys were right. I eventually decided the CPU will be the slowest HT-enabled Northwood P4, the 2.4C (multi=12/512k/FSB800/DDR400/66W), hopefully giving a substantial upgrade over Prescott Celeron of 2.4 (multi=18/256k/FSB533/DDR333/73W). :) The 2.6C was 40% more expensive for just a minor gain in speed, and others were reaching as far as 2-2.5 times the 2.4C price on a local ebay-like site, since for most people it is still cheaper to replace a dead CPU or mobo in an old computer than it is to buy a new one, and many sellers profit on the fact.

There's one more thing I was wondering. Is there any software-cooling (power saving) for HT-enabled Northwoods, or something alike? I might disable HT if I find it useless performance-wise and that should save some watts too (I read in one review that "C" P4's with disabled HT ran 4-5 degrees cooler, hence obivously consumed few watts less). I might downclock too, at least a bit, if I see I can get away with it (the only use of the system will be as internet (Youtube) access portal, so overall performance is not important). Sadly, the mobo gives no undervolting options...

And one more thing - the 300W ATX PSU I have, that is powering an Athlon2400 (SDRAM based) setup without any issues, could not start this P4 mobo even with Pentium 4-M and AGP GeForce4 MX440 on it. Is it possible they required that much power that the mobo couldn't supply it, or is it likely some compatibility issue? It is some ANS brand.

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by washu » Wed Oct 08, 2014 8:54 am

gamebox wrote:There's one more thing I was wondering. Is there any software-cooling (power saving) for HT-enabled Northwoods, or something alike?
As I said before, Windows already does this automatically. It executes the HLT instruction when the CPU is idle. As long as you are not running Win98 or older you are fine. Desktop Northwoods do not support EIST so there is nothing more that can be done.
And one more thing - the 300W ATX PSU I have, that is powering an Athlon2400 (SDRAM based) setup without any issues, could not start this P4 mobo even with Pentium 4-M and AGP GeForce4 MX440 on it. Is it possible they required that much power that the mobo couldn't supply it, or is it likely some compatibility issue? It is some ANS brand.
The P4 is likely putting far higher demands on the +12V line than the Athlon. An old PS has more capacity in the 3.3V & 5V lines which is what most Athlon's draw heavily on. Plus given the age of the PS it likely cannot deliver it's rated output anymore, if it ever could.

gamebox
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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by gamebox » Wed Oct 08, 2014 9:42 am

Thanks washu. :) The strange thing remains though why the CnQ A64 never gets cooled down to room temperature on long idle runs if it is HLTed by newer OS (and indeed quite a few sources say HLT is embedded in them).

Hm, ANS 300W PSU says it's 15A on 12V. Even half of that should've been enough for the Pentium 4-M+GeForce4, even if all power was drawn from 12V alone. :? My current Rexpower 350W PSU is rated just the same, and starts the board fine even with 73W Prescott.

There is another (small) hope. An Athlon mobo is being offered currently in my town for a starting price of less than an euro and no offers. It has 8 blown caps, but hopefully no other issues than that. The Athlon with software cooling could be somewhat more energy-efficient in total than P4 as it would HLT on any possible occasion driving the consumption of the system to symbolic levels. That system could than also reuse the 300W PSU, and (in this case) also the 2x512 GB DDR modules I have on Intel board.

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by Vicotnik » Wed Oct 08, 2014 10:03 am

gamebox wrote:Hm, ANS 300W PSU says it's 15A on 12V. Even half of that should've been enough for the Pentium 4-M+GeForce4, even if all power was drawn from 12V alone. :? My current Rexpower 350W PSU is rated just the same, and starts the board fine even with 73W Prescott.
Could be a timing issue also. I have a cheap power supply tester and it measures the rails and also how long it takes for the PSU to start. I've noticed that some older boards are more forgiving to slow PSUs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_good_signal
gamebox wrote:There is another (small) hope. An Athlon mobo is being offered currently in my town for a starting price of less than an euro and no offers. It has 8 blown caps, but hopefully no other issues than that.
Hopefully it's not an Athlon classic from 1999. ;)

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by washu » Wed Oct 08, 2014 10:32 am

gamebox wrote:Thanks washu. :) The strange thing remains though why the CnQ A64 never gets cooled down to room temperature on long idle runs if it is HLTed by newer OS (and indeed quite a few sources say HLT is embedded in them).
An A64 is still using (and wasting) a lot of power even when CnQ and HLT are in use at idle. CnQ and HLT make your CPU use less power at idle than it would otherwise, but they don't get it anywhere close to being efficient. All that wasted power becomes heat.
Hm, ANS 300W PSU says it's 15A on 12V. Even half of that should've been enough for the Pentium 4-M+GeForce4, even if all power was drawn from 12V alone. :? My current Rexpower 350W PSU is rated just the same, and starts the board fine even with 73W Prescott.
It is a very unlikely that your PSU can actually produce 15A on 12V anymore given its age. It's also likely it never could even when new and the rating is completely fictitious.
There is another (small) hope. An Athlon mobo is being offered currently in my town for a starting price of less than an euro and no offers. It has 8 blown caps, but hopefully no other issues than that. The Athlon with software cooling could be somewhat more energy-efficient in total than P4 as it would HLT on any possible occasion driving the consumption of the system to symbolic levels. That system could than also reuse the 300W PSU, and (in this case) also the 2x512 GB DDR modules I have on Intel board.
You are not going to get an efficient system out of a P4 or Athlon no matter what you do. HLT, CnQ or other software wont matter, either CPU will still be wasting a lot of watts even in long idle.

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by gamebox » Wed Oct 08, 2014 11:24 am

Vicotnik - it might be some issue like that with Power-Good signal. :) The PSU is really ancient - bought in 2003, however it is still operable. The board on offer is the ASUS A7N266-VM, S462 but DDR (266-333 if I recall correctly). I already have an Athlon "classic" mobo - the Abit KT7E SDRAM-based one I love so much although it is useless today except perhaps for offline DVD/XVID media center of sort. :)

Washu - it is true that my main A64 setup is nowhere near todays ultra efficient and high performance CPUs, PSUs and the like, but it is lightyears cheaper too, and savings in electricity alone over A64 platform wouldn't justify investment in new hardware when an existing one still gives good enough performance for everyday use. Payback time, simply, is likely to extend over several years.
You are wrong saying that HLTed (idling) Athlon CPU system wastes a lot of power - it is just 6-7 Watts. I tested mine and on idle it turned dead-cold, colder than the mobo's temperature level. The same goes for PSU-exhausted air. The rest of the system is an OS-only hard-drive (and that could become a OS-only USB given supporting mobo), and low power (<10W) graphic card. The system will, of course, be replaced with some better efficiency hardware/CPU as soon as it becomes available to me at an acceptible price.

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by washu » Wed Oct 08, 2014 11:53 am

gamebox wrote: Washu - it is true that my main A64 setup is nowhere near todays ultra efficient and high performance CPUs, PSUs and the like, but it is lightyears cheaper too, and savings in electricity alone over A64 platform wouldn't justify investment in new hardware when an existing one still gives good enough performance for everyday use. Payback time, simply, is likely to extend over several years.
Depending on what you do the payback time could be much sooner. Do you do anything that stresses the CPU for long periods? Video/audio encoding? Payback could be very short in those cases.

Anytime you stress the CPU you use higher power modes longer and less idle time than a faster processor.
You are wrong saying that HLTed (idling) Athlon CPU system wastes a lot of power - it is just 6-7 Watts. I tested mine and on idle it turned dead-cold, colder than the mobo's temperature level. The same goes for PSU-exhausted air.
You just said:
The strange thing remains though why the CnQ A64 never gets cooled down to room temperature on long idle runs
So which is it?

The tests I've seen show your winchester A64 3500 uses 13-14W at idle (measured at the 12V line, so includes VRM losses). Not as bad as a P4, but still quite a lot compared to a modern CPU. Combined with your old MB and PSU and that is a lot of wasted watts even if the exhaust is "cold".

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by gamebox » Thu Oct 09, 2014 6:43 am

Washu: I am a big fan of video encoding, processing and filtering. Been doing it since 2001. Nowadays, given that I digitalized most of VHS-DVD material I planned to, I don't do it that often but sometimes I still need to because of ocassionally grossly oversized HD videos on the internet. Video encoding is often done by amateurs with sometimes catastrophic mistakes - resulting either in unnecessarily low quality or oversized files, and sometimes the videos are actually primarily prepared for online streaming with too high, wasting (often constant) bitrate. I don't like either, so sometimes I download the best source and process it myself to keep.

Payback through savings in energy consumption is another story. Here where I live electricity is not yet that expensive. Only a few years ago, even buying a CFL wasn't economically justifiable, as calculated savings over its lifetime still didn't reach even-out levels with the cost of using regular filament bulbs - I calculated it myself. It is not the same today, of course, but a new energy-efficient system would be a rather big investment given that I have almost none of today's mainstream hardware (except for the monitor), and I estimate payback time at 5+ years.

My main setup is A64 based. The CPU consumes 29W idle, as it is 67W TDP core revision (S939). I don't know the consumption of Nforce4 chipset, but I can feel it is massive. 45W TDP AM2 A64 is my dream, but at the moment it would still require substantial investment to obtain (I'd need DDR2 ram and a new mobo, perhaps even a newer PSU, and all that sadly still isn't cheap here).
The other Athlon is XP2400, and it idles at about 7 Watts, is dead-cold, and doesn't stress the PSU. It doesn't mean that much as its consumption quickly scales up to full 62 W on load, but HT P4 sadly can't offer even those savings.

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by gamebox » Sat Oct 11, 2014 7:29 am

Update: The P4 2.4C, Northwood, Hyper-Threaded arrived yesterday. :) The results are as follows:

- FSB was reduced from 200 to 150 (DDR@300). The resulting 1.8 GHz speed was enough for YT playback @ 360p (maximum possible resolution on my 1.5 mbit/sec ADSL), but - while inside browser's tab. For full screen playback of 4:3 videos @ 360p, FSB needed to be raised to 175 (2.1 GHz, DDR@350). CPU temperature is about 30c outside the case, sadly, no options to undervolt exist on the mobo. I don't know the consumption at these speeds.
- Hyper Threading technology proved to be very useful to help CPU deal with the strongest bottleneck in the system - the 12.1 GB Quantum Fireball ATA33 hard drive. Without it, CPU load rises excessively while data is being written/read.
- USB stick as a system drive came as a second idea (the whole XP setup with drivers, codecs, audio-video player, Mozilla and Flash is about 780mb), but rated read/write speeds, sadly, seem about the same. However, is still desirable in a setup one day, as it would lower power consumption and noise.
- Most power is drawn from 3.3 and 5V rails, with the latter dropping as low as 4.27V (without compromising stability, though). Such extreme voltage sag even made me think that something might be wrong with the mobo or its voltage sensing circuits. The 12V is almost unused - it shoots to 12.4V, while the same PSU in my Athlon64 setup sees the same rail sag to 11.7V, while 5V holds spot-on at the target voltage.
- Virtual ram (swap file) is turned off, Firefox's caching too, HD is defragmented, desktop colours set to darker shades and home page to Blackl. The monitor will be my trusty 17' Flatron CRT.

Not efficient at all and probably about 2.5x more power hungry than my Athlon64 with 22' Samsung LED, but the best possible and the most optimized setup for the moment. I will, of course, be looking for an AMD CPU for that system as well.

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by Vicotnik » Sat Oct 11, 2014 9:21 am

A system that does what it's intended to do. Well done. :)

I'd make sure the HDD is in DMA mode, just in case. That the first thing I check if HDD access causes CPU load spikes.

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Re: HT or no-HT Northwood Pentium 4?

Post by gamebox » Tue Oct 14, 2014 4:21 am

Thanks, Vicotnik. :)

I made sure yesterday HD is in DMA. It is unfortunatelly very slow as it is ancient, rated speeds are ridiculous by today's standards, but parents wanted a dirt-cheap computer and those don't get better than this. The HD was bought on an auction for about 80 euro cents, fortunatelly has very low hours, was used in a private setup, is in perfect health and fully optimized now, but rated speeds can't be made any better then the technology allows.

Everything's fully settled now. LG Flatron CRT is set to 1024x768 to make it easier for the system to deal with full screen YT playback, screen refresh rate set as low as possible while still eliminating flicker (to lower consumption and slow down the degradation of cathode ray tube used for about 5 years), the GPU is GeForce4 instead of X550 it came with as it's performance is mostly unimportant while power consumption matters, I've also chosen cheap energy-efficient lighting to round up the working environment (electronic fluorescent @ 18W), for the moment I'm looking for switching 12V 1A power supply for modem-router to replace current bulky (and wasting) iron-core one. LED-strip power supplies seem appropriate for instance.

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