Pentium 4 - FWIW

[NeptNutz]

[For What It's Worth...]

I've been eagerly trying to get an old Pentium 4 box to stream some games. If you are thinking about trying the same, perhaps this may be of some use.

(BTW - I don't have tons of meticulous details on this. These are mostly my ups and downs just looking for a good setup.)

SYSTEM

Pentium 4 2.8GHz
ABIT TH7II
2GB RDRAM PC800
HIS Radeon HD 4350 AGP4x - via HDMI
100Mbit LAN - wired
Lenovo N5902 ("I LOVE this thing!") - connected to 4-port USB PCI card
Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver - connected to 4-port USB PCI card
Windows XP SP3 w/ Microsoft Security Essentials
Generic keyboard (mostly for installs)

Windows XP
This system has been fine. Have even played a good portion of Half-Life 2 on it with very solid frame rates on high settings. In-Home Streaming, however, just "Hiccups!" "Hiccups!" "Hiccups!" on PixelJunk Shooter and Batman:AA. It works, and is stable, but it is essentially unplayable.

Ubuntu 12.04.3
Installed fine, generic xorg looked great with the HD 4350. No proprietary drivers available. Streaming Batman:AA was better but choppy and in the 15fps range. Went to AMD and Ubuntu help to manually install drivers. It worked, but it was horrible! Looked worse than original Ubuntu. Max resolution was around 1280x768 or something, under-scanned and acceleration seemed no better than before. AMD driver found the sound hardware but it was unable to get sound through the HDMI. Ubuntu was also being very glitchy.

Linux Mint 13 MATE
600 updates! Found a proprietary AMD "Linux Mint approved" driver and it even installed Catalyst Control Center. This is good, because the Lenovo remote was dragging during the install. Performance was similar to Ubuntu, but the AMD legacy driver and CCC--even at 1080p--couldn't scan to the full size of my screen. Again, generic xorg was better.
No sound through HDMI.

Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon
6 GB. 300 updates. I had to jump the BIOS to get it to reboot! (?) No proprietary drivers. Generic xorg was as smooth as Ubuntu 12.04. A pretty good start to PixelJunk Shooter. Batman:AA was much choppier than Ubuntu. Random soft crashes especially in attempts at Big Picture
No sound through HDMI.

Linux Mint 16 Xfce
7 GB. 199 updates. Ran nice and smooth. Probably the most stable install so far. It found the HDMI sound HARDWARE--but again, no sound! No proprietary AMD drivers found. Surprisingly, Big Picture ran about as fast as I've seen it. Batman:AA and PixelJunk Shooter also ran very solidly, but very 15fps slow.

Linux Mint Debian (LMDE)
// Still working on this... This install has been from Hell! Rotten disc burns, broken GRUB, the Update of INFINITY!!! 1,300 updates at 20 kB/s??? Really, Mint? Really?!
(I highly recommend MD5 checksum, non re-writable media, 4x write speed, and disc verification for this distro. Oh yeah, and a time machine - for the updates!!!)

Even though this is Beta time, I'm pretty much done with the Pentium 4. If somebody can send me some good overclock ideas, or IRQ tweaks, or whatever, I might give it a try. I tried some overclocking, but no luck. Besides, what's the point of a streaming client at that point?

Essentially, I think that the old data and system bus just can't cut it (see my chart). I have an ASUS netbook with an N450 processor, 2GB RAM and an SSD drive, which has practically NO GRAPHICS capabilities, yet it beats the Pentium 4--hands down!--and is actually "PLAYABLE". It can stream at a solid 15-20+fps over WiFi. I even played BURNOUT on it! (That kinda' sucked, but it played!)


Computer Memory Module Memory Clock I/O Bus Peak Transfer rate

Netbook DDR2 800 200MHz 400MHz 6400MB/s

Pentium 4 PC800 RDRAM 400MHz 100MHz 3200MB/s



tl; dr

If you are toying with the idea of streaming to a Pentium 4, I would say, make sure you have AMD 5000 series or over and memory on a system bus that is not from the Stone Age!

[To0]

Cheers for this, maybe get a prize for worst machine to actually get Home streaming working?

I'll have to see if I can get my EeePC 701 to do it...

[NeptNutz]

Originally posted by To0:

Cheers for this, maybe get a prize for worst machine to actually get Home streaming working?

I was thinking more like a badge - 1,000 XP points per piece of garbage got running!

This makes two. Have I ever told you about my Netbook Steam Machine?

Actually, the little ASUS is quite the monster mobile device with SSD and Linux. Many in this household now regularly abandon the iPad to actually "get something done" on it.

Originally posted by To0:

I'll have to see if I can get my EeePC 701 to do it...

No way! There is such a thing?

[ZombieBloodLust]

Out of curiosity, does your ASUS or EEEPC have a Broadcom Crystal HD Media accelerator card installed? Very curious if we can get that to work with the ATOM processor. I have a HP Mini 210-1010 I have upgraded to a BCm70010/12 (70015 being the better card) .http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/ LINUX drivers available.
My BCM70010/12 Runs 1080 content like butter on the non HD display. Just a thought they can be purchased from ebay/amazon for $15-$25 May be worth it if just for the absurdness of it. I hope to get a beta soon and add my results! Running nay steam game ( Half life,oldskool etc) run like garbage, but if the heavy processing can be put on a Better machine and Streamed using the Broadcom card properly we could be in business!!!!

[NeptNutz]

@ZombieBloodLust, That is the first time I have ever heard of the Broadcom. As far as I know, my netbook is all bone stock minus the two upgrades I mentioned. I didn't even know there was room in there for such a thing. But now that I do, it seems the little science project will continue! :-)

Interestingly, I hooked the netbook up to a VGA capable television the other night (just for grins and giggles) and, to my astonishment, it popped out 1920x1080!!! I guess Linux Mint Debian is more capable than I thought! I havent tried dual head on that netbook since Windows 7 Starter and Ubuntu 12.04, which both had resolution issues with 1366x768.

[NeptNutz]

Nevermind. As far as I can tell, there's no place for a PCIe card in there. :-(

[Hunter Biden's Massive Schlong]

Pentium 4 3.20GHz
2.50 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 4670
I was streaming with a 54mb/s connection over wifi (54 from the client, 72 to 120 mb/s wifi on server). It was slow in Paranautical activity, somewhat passable in VVVVVV. I will try it with the client wired to the router, and the server wireless. So far, it is passable for beta, though I can't get minecraft to work, as I can't access the desktop on my remote pc.

[NeptNutz]

@Captain, I'll be curious to see your results. Ultimately, I think my mobo with the ancient data bus did me in for streaming. It's ironic, because my netbook is coming along quite nicely as a streaming client yet has nowhere near the hardware the Pentium 4 does. And natively, the Pentium 4, with the 4350, has the power to run Half-Life 2 on it.

[Hunter Biden's Massive Schlong]

@NeptNutz After wiring the client in, performance was ok. I played FTL for a good while, and other than a resolution issue, it was great. My AGP bus is x8 though, so YMMV. I am now going to try it on my mother's pc in my livingroom, same networking, wifi from host, client wired, but on a newer dual core pc with integrated graphics. I will post specs and performance later.

[NeptNutz]

@Captain. Wow! You've got that crazy HIS IceQ card, eh?! That's pretty cool. Looks like you might be running an 800 MT/s FSB bus too? Well, short of that monster Radeon HD 3850, with the 256-bit memory bus, I'd say this train has almost reached its destination.

[Hunter Biden's Massive Schlong]

Funnily enough, it seems like the pentium system actually had better performance, at least comparatively. If my mothers core 2 duo system had a graphics card, it would probably blow the Pentium system away. The core 2 duo system kept getting slow decode messages.

[NeptNutz]

Originally posted by <|Ω| Captain Flywheel rɛdɪt>:

Funnily enough, it seems like the pentium system actually had better performance, at least comparatively. If my mothers core 2 duo system had a graphics card, it would probably blow the Pentium system away. The core 2 duo system kept getting slow decode messages.

Hmm. That's kind of interesting. Well, like the Pentium to the Atom, that's a "stronger" processor. But, clearly, it's about more than that.

[Umino]

I guess it really was the "system bus from the stone age" that messed it up for you NeptNutz because I tried it with a similar P4 yesterday and it went quite satisfying.

the system I used as client is a socket 478 Pentium 4 single core at 2.8 GHz stock clock, though with 1GB of DDR 333 RAM in dual channel mode and a lowly GeForce 4 MX AGP graphics card.

running windows XP, it took streaming over a wired network very good with almost no hiccups but it sometimes failed to discover when and if the host system went online

I have not tested it with linux yet but plan to change OS to a linux-based one if it works for what I want

I heard someone cooked up a version of steamOS with kodi built into it ... sounds good ... now also add "emulation station" and an option to cycle through the frontends (steam, kodi, ES) without reboot and it would be the perfect mix for living-room-pc use IMO

but that is another story

[NeptNutz]

Originally posted by Umino:

I guess it really was the "system bus from the stone age" that messed it up for you NeptNutz because I tried it with a similar P4 yesterday and it went quite satisfying.

Good to know! Maybe there's hope for that CPU yet. ;-)

Originally posted by Umino:

I heard someone cooked up a version of steamOS with kodi built into it ... sounds good ...

VaporOS.
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/496881121379859711/



Thanks for reading my ridiculous post and contributing your experiences!

[Umino]

trying to find some new use and purpose for old hardware instead of simply throwing it away does not sound ridiculous to me.

a couple years ago I was working at a recycling plant and we got like 2 to 4 large cargo containers coming in every day - filled with computers, TVs, game consoles, turntables, hifi systems and other electronic equippment people threw away. it was unbelievable. almost heart-breaking sometimes.

I bet at least half of the stuff might still have been in a working condition if we would not have emptied the containers by simply tipping them over.

anyway - due to christmas and all that I have not had the time to do some more intense testing with that P4 system (santa dropped me a steam controller wich I am testing since then) but I plan to get back to it as soon as possible and post results. if it works well with vaporOS (thanks for the link) this system could be a cool little media/streaming box that goes with the CRT TV I use in one of my rooms upstairs. (found a nice low profile desktop case on amazon wich I bought used/B-stock for under 20 euros - the system needs a new case anyway)

[MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™]

Originally posted by Umino:

I guess it really was the "system bus from the stone age" that messed it up for you NeptNutz because I tried it with a similar P4 yesterday and it went quite satisfying.

the system I used as client is a socket 478 Pentium 4 single core at 2.8 GHz stock clock, though with 1GB of DDR 333 RAM in dual channel mode and a lowly GeForce 4 MX AGP graphics card.

running windows XP, it took streaming over a wired network very good with almost no hiccups but it sometimes failed to discover when and if the host system went online

I have not tested it with linux yet but plan to change OS to a linux-based one if it works for what I want

I heard someone cooked up a version of steamOS with kodi built into it ... sounds good ... now also add "emulation station" and an option to cycle through the frontends (steam, kodi, ES) without reboot and it would be the perfect mix for living-room-pc use IMO

but that is another story

Yes but at what resolution.

The limits of what is possible is interesting.

Though its funny the processors in decent cell phones these days are on par with a core 2duo, which is of course much faster than a p4.