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Classic PC fun: Reviving a Pentium 4 3.06

March 14th, 2007

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Just how much performance can be extracted from a used PC? Especially one with relatively humble specs like this (Pentium 4 3.06GHZ HT). You may be surprised:

Original specifications
Pentium 4 3.06 HT
512MB DDR333
Nvidia geforce 440MX
80GB+40GB hdd

Existing problems:
CPU ran somewhat warm (anything from 45 degrees upwards idle)

Physical cleanup

1. Disassembled the PC to component level, and cleaned every single piece. This involved some amount of sneezing but it was an interesting process. Thankfully the PC had an easy slide out tray for the motherboard.
2. Removed the CPU and cleaned it, also took apart the heatsink/fan assembly and cleaned/polished it.
3. Reseated the CPU using arctic silver. (CPU now idles at around 38 degrees celcius!)

Upgrades/mods:

1. Tweaked the BIOS, and optimized memory timings, so as to get the best performance out of the system.
2. Switched to a SATA 250GB drive.
3. Fully redid the cooling system - so as to circulate air more efficiently within the case.
4. Added a fan for one of the board heatsinks (possibly the onboard GPU), and a passive heatsink to another chip (possibly the SATA controller?)
5. Switched to the onboard graphics, (to reduce power usage, also the onboard graphics support directx 9).
6. Added an external PCI sound card as the internal one is a bit resource heavy.
7. Added a separate fan for the hard disk. Hard disk now reads an operating temperature of around 36 degrees celcius!)

Possible concerns

1. Due to long term use under extreme heat conditions, and manufacturer flaws, a number of capacitors have started to leak from the top. This leads to capacitor failure and system instability/failure.
2. System uses DDR333 ram. To enable dual channel operation I should at least match the speed of the chip. Unfortunately nobody seems to carry DDR 333 any more. Hopefully I will be able to find a 512MB DDR333 or DDR400 chip which will work.

Final performance benchmarks
(as compared to a dual core pentium D)

Windows XP professional: boot in 14.7 seconds.

Conclusion
Hyperthreading is a viable technology - as the benchmarks show, it gives the dual core PC a serious run for its money!

Todo: Get more ram and enable dual channel.

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