Pentium 4 - Repair and Gentle Overclock

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:01]Hey guys.

[00:00:02]I never actually owned a Pentium 4 back in the day.

[00:00:05]To be honest, at the time I really couldn't afford one.

[00:00:09]So, when I saw this one on eBay the other day, I figured it was a great opportunity to make a financially unwise decision.

[00:00:17]Let's open it up and we'll take a look.

[00:00:21]So, we've got an ASUS P4S533 motherboard.

[00:00:28]And we've got a video card in there.

[00:00:31]That's an ATI Rage 128.

[00:00:34]Believe it's a 32 meg.

[00:00:38]There's a four-port USB 1.1 card.

[00:00:42]And a dual-port USB breakout card.

[00:00:46]As well as a PCI modem.

[00:00:50]There's 768 megs of DDR memory.

[00:00:56]And that's a Pentium 4 Northwood 2 GHz.

[00:01:02]Now, the seller indicates that the system does work.

[00:01:06]But, as he put it, it needs a little love.

[00:01:11]Now, on first glance, I don't see any bad capacitors.

[00:01:15]Which is rather surprising for a Pentium 4.

[00:01:19]I believe this board came out in 2002.

[00:01:22]Which places it smack dab in the middle of the capacitor plague.

[00:01:29]Some of these caps do appear a little bit wobbly.

[00:01:33]They may have vented on the bottom.

[00:01:36]But, for the most part, I don't see anything that's bulging.

[00:01:43]There's a few here that are questionable.

[00:01:46]But, for the most part, they appear to be okay. At least visually.

[00:01:54]But, if we move down to the bottom of the board.

[00:01:59]There's one here that has definitely leaked.

[00:02:03]So, it looks like we're doing a recap on this board.

[00:02:07]For those of you who may not know, between the years 1999 and 2005, a lot of electrolytic capacitors failed prematurely because of a faulty electrolyte formula.

[00:02:20]This was known as the capacitor plague, and the Pentium 4 was one of its primary victims.

[00:02:28]So, I got all those green Teicon capacitors removed and replaced with these bright red Wurth Elektronik caps.

[00:02:37]That looks pretty good.

[00:02:40]Now, visually, most of the old capacitors looked completely okay, but when I tested them, pretty much all of them had drifted way off spec.

[00:02:52]So, you really can't always go by looks.

[00:02:58]I had to order some 6.3 V 3300 microfarad caps.

[00:03:04]The ones that I had were chunky boys, and they wouldn't fit in here.

[00:03:12]So, let's flip the board over, and we'll take a look.

[00:03:17]Now, those are all connected to this long copper ground plane.

[00:03:21]If we try and desolder them, that copper is going to suck up a lot of the heat.

[00:03:27]That'll make it very difficult to remove those components.

[00:03:31]So, I'm going to use my hot air rework station.

[00:03:34]We'll preheat that area of the board.

[00:03:39]I'm not actually trying to melt the solder.

[00:03:41]I just want to take the chill off the board.

[00:03:46]Try not to focus on one spot for too long, or you can cause warping, even delamination of the board.

[00:03:56]If I was doing this professionally, I'd probably buy one of those infrared board preheaters.

[00:04:02]But those are really expensive. I can't justify that as a hobbyist.

[00:04:08]So, that should be long enough.

[00:04:12]I'm going to add a little bit of fresh solder to each of those points.

[00:04:17]And then carefully walk those capacitors off the board.

[00:04:24]Now, I do have a vacuum desoldering tool, but unfortunately, it's a fairly low-end model. It doesn't always work terribly well on multi-layer boards.

[00:04:37]And as you can see, the camera decided to focus on my shoulder instead of the board.

[00:04:42]So, let's zip through this.

[00:04:46]And we'll see the end result.

[00:04:50]So, we've got four Ty-Cap capacitors, 6.3 V, 3300 microfarad removed from the board.

[00:04:59]In fact, I removed the fifth one off camera.

[00:05:04]Now, I tested all of these capacitors.

[00:05:06]Visually, they all look completely okay.

[00:05:10]But of the five, only one of them actually registered as a capacitor.

[00:05:16]And it showed 1200 microfarads.

[00:05:22]So, removing these was the right decision.

[00:05:26]Now, I'm going to use my vacuum desoldering tool to clear those holes, and we'll get our new caps installed.

[00:05:35]I have some brand new Rubicon caps.

[00:05:38]Unfortunately, my red Wurth electronic caps were a little bit too big to fit in there.

[00:05:45]But that's okay. Rubicon is excellent brand.

[00:05:49]Now, I should point out the silk screening on this board is opposite to what I normally see.

[00:05:57]That white half moon typically indicates the negative pole of the cap.

[00:06:02]In this case, it indicates the positive.

[00:06:06]Always a good idea to check the board and orient the caps properly.

[00:06:11]Electrolytics typically don't react terribly well to reverse polarity.

[00:06:20]So, I'll get those soldered in place and we'll mount the board back in the case for testing.

[00:06:29]Now, something I probably should have done before I put the board back in the case, let's pull the heat sink. We'll take a look at the thermal paste.

[00:06:37]It is 25 years old and Pentium 4 tends to run really hot, so it probably needs refreshing.

[00:06:48]Yeah, to be honest, I can't tell if that's the remnants of a thermal pad or if that's simply perished thermal paste.

[00:06:56]Either way, it doesn't look healthy.

[00:06:59]Yeah, a little bit of isopropyl alcohol will take care of that, no problem.

[00:07:05]Here's a good look at our CPU.

[00:07:08]That's labeled 2A GHz.

[00:07:12]I had to check. Apparently, that's very common for the Northwood variant.

[00:07:18]Let's get some fresh thermal paste on there and we'll reinstall that heat sink.

[00:07:26]And just plug that fan back in. We should be good to go for testing.

[00:07:32]I tested the power supply off camera and no great surprise, I had to replace a number of capacitors there as well.

[00:07:41]The Pentium 4 was particularly hard on power supplies.

[00:07:47]But we're up and running.

[00:07:49]And we're in the CMOS setup.

[00:07:52]I had to replace the dead CMOS battery, of course.

[00:07:59]Now we're going to be playing with the CPU speed in a moment or two.

[00:08:03]For now, I'm going to leave it to the default 2 GHz.

[00:08:09]Temperatures look okay.

[00:08:12]It shows 34C for our CPU.

[00:08:17]And a rather questionable 35 for the motherboard.

[00:08:23]Now I've got an 8 gig compact flash in the system.

[00:08:28]Let's boot up into Windows XP.

[00:08:30]And we'll have some fun.

[00:08:34]Now if you've been on the channel for a while, you know I'm really not much of a gamer.

[00:08:39]But there was one game in the early 2000s that I really got into.

[00:08:44]That was the original Unreal Tournament 99.

[00:08:50]This computer came with an ATI Rage video card.

[00:08:54]It's not the best card in the world.

[00:08:57]But it's the best AGP video card that I have on hand.

[00:09:01]So it's the one we're going to test with.

[00:09:05]Let's fire up a practice match.

[00:09:08]And I'll do a timed demo one to show our frames per second.

[00:09:16]Now that's not too bad starting out.

[00:09:19]We're getting around 30 FPS.

[00:09:23]But it quickly goes down when we start to see any sort of action on screen.

[00:09:34]Yeah, when it gets particularly busy, the frame rate is dropping down to the low 20s.

[00:09:41]I saw a 21 a moment or two ago.

[00:09:46]And yeah, now it's hovering around 24.

[00:09:52]It's still playable, but it's not great.

[00:09:58]So, let's see what we can do about that.

[00:10:01]I'm going to reboot. We'll go back into BIOS.

[00:10:06]And I'm going to try a mild overclock.

[00:10:11]The CPU is multiplier locked, so we can't change that, but we can increase the front side bus.

[00:10:20]It's currently set to a 100 MHz.

[00:10:23]Let's bump it up to a 110.

[00:10:27]Now, that'll give us a speed of 2.2 GHz, but it does overclock the memory and the PCI bus as well.

[00:10:40]So, with a 10% overclock, Windows appears to be perfectly stable.

[00:10:45]I poked around for a bit before I went back into the game.

[00:10:51]Loading into that same practice match, I do see a mild improvement in overall frame rates.

[00:11:01]Previously, we were seeing an average around 24.

[00:11:04]I would say now we've got around 27 FPS.

[00:11:10]Obviously, not a massive increase, and honestly, I doubt I'd notice it without those numbers in front of me, but I think we can probably do better.

[00:11:20]Let's reboot. We'll go back into BIOS.

[00:11:24]And we'll push it a little further.

[00:11:28]Now, as I mentioned earlier, when you mess with your front side bus, it also impacts the PCI bus that would normally run at 33 MHz.

[00:11:40]That's going to be overclocked to 40 MHz, which is already a little bit sketchy.

[00:11:47]Not only that, the memory is overclocked.

[00:11:50]So, this really depends on the quality of the memory that you have installed.

[00:12:00]So, we're up and running at 2.4 GHz.

[00:12:03]Once again, Windows appears to be stable, and I'm going back into that practice match.

[00:12:12]Yeah, I know, this time we've got a noticeable improvement over the 2 GHz.

[00:12:18]The game is running a lot smoother.

[00:12:21]There's still slowdowns here and there, but that's probably more because of that video card.

[00:12:31]I'd say we've got an average frame rate of around 29, maybe 30 FPS.

[00:12:40]Well, we can try for one more increase, but I think we're just about at the limit here.

[00:12:47]Any further increase will put our PCI bus over 40 MHz, which doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize that the IDE controller is also on the PCI bus.

[00:13:03]So, we do risk data corruption.

[00:13:06]But, what the heck, let's give it a shot.

[00:13:09]I'm going to go for 2.5 GHz.

[00:13:13]That would be a front side bus of 125.

[00:13:23]And yeah, it will post at that speed, but it's not going to boot into Windows.

[00:13:31]Can't say as I'm terribly surprised.

[00:13:35]I'm going to reboot, drop it back to 2.4 GHz, and then we'll take a look at our temperatures.

[00:13:43]Remember, this is still using the stock cooler from Intel.

[00:13:46]So, really nothing fancy.

[00:13:51]Now, CPU indicates 41° C.

[00:13:54]Motherboard is 38.

[00:13:58]I can probably eke out a little bit more speed by playing with the core voltage, but I'd rather not risk that.

[00:14:07]This is an older CPU.

[00:14:10]I don't know what kind of life it had before it came to me.

[00:14:14]So, let's be kind to it.

[00:14:18]I'm going to leave it at 2.4 GHz, and see if maybe I can get a better AGP video card.

[00:14:28]So, before I close off this video, I'd like to point out that we recently surpassed 1,000 subscribers on this channel.

[00:14:37]As a matter of fact, we didn't just surpass it.

[00:14:40]We absolutely blew it out of the water.

[00:14:44]And I want to say thank you for that.

[00:14:47]It's less than a year since I started the channel, and it's grown faster than I ever expected.

[00:14:57]So, if you haven't already, please feel free to like and subscribe.

[00:15:02]Drop a comment down below.

[00:15:05]Did you have a Pentium 4 back in the day?

[00:15:08]And if so, what was your impression of it?

[00:15:12]If you want to support the channel, I have a buy me a coffee link in the video description.

[00:15:19]And as always, thanks for watching.