Hello again! Life has not been easy to dedicate enough time to retro hardware, but managed to keep doing a few things here and there and finally was able to finish this post, with another additional in the works! The idea for this one started when I was able to put my hands on this pile of hardware saving it of landing in the trash. 
The MSI board has a 1 Ghz Duron CPU installed and a few bad caps, but stills works! But the focus of this post as the title says is going to be in IBM machine. Don`t worry, AMD time is going to come later. 
The IBM machine is a MT-T 8188-PYG, powered with a Pentium 4 Northwood 2.4 Ghz processor. It looked dusty and missing a couple of parts like the original PSU, hard disk and a holder that should be there to hold in place any expansion cards you may install, but was not the end of the world since the motherboard takes a regular ATX PSU and we can live without that holder. 
And like on those movies where some characters are saved by the clock or coin in their pockets from the fatal bullet, this board was spared of getting some serious damage thanks to the original 2032 that was installed. It’s not so easy to dent one of those, so that was rough!
Luckily enough the machine returned to life with a fresh battery and PSU! Even better the 1 Gb DDR PC3200 bank that came installed also worked perfectly! Same for the CD-ROM and floppy drives.
The case, aside that missing part was not in a terrible shape, with evidence of a bit of liquid reaching the inside and causing a bit of rust (but not in the bottom!) and the exterior cleaning up really well with some Windex only missing the Intel Pentium IV badge that was aside the Windows XP badge still on the case.
Well, time for some Windows XP! Went to my spare parts pile and decided to go with an 80 Gb Western Digital for the hard drive. 
The basic installation flowed without any problems aside setting the hard disk and CD ROM jumpers properly. So it was the moment to update the machine a bit more!
When I was meditating in what upgrades could be good for this case, I remembered that in one of the #cybercirujas events I picked up a couple of AGP cards that were untested so… testing/benchmark time!
One of the cards was the 64 Mb variant of the GeForce MX 4000 card, I already knew the 128 Mb variant since I installed that one in my current Prescott Pentium 4 rig, and you can read about that build here.
Visually the two cards are identical, only with half of the memory populated in the 64 Mb variant.
The other card is a GeForce FX 5200 of 128 Mb, the problem with this card was a completely stuck cooler, but I was able to lubricate and restore that. No other issue with the card aside needing some cleaning a fresh thermal paste.
Now, time to some benchmarking! Note that I run all those test at 800x600 to be fair using a “middle ground” setting.
As you can see in the videos, the performance between the two systems is actually pretty close in the 3D Mark 01 testing, following the changes between graphics cards and even Northwood takes some points of Prescott, here a side by side comparison.
Even in 3D Mark 03 happens something similar, but only the FX 5200 card was tested here since the MX 4000 lacks the necessary features.
Also in this test both processors ended with scores almost identical to each other running at 800x600 resolution with default settings, like mentioned before.
If the “Dual Core” Pentium 4 system sounds like it should win over the older Northwood single core older brother, why they look so similar, especially in the older software? Well, you can read a bit about the history of the different Pentium 4 iterations in the wiki, but in summary we can confirm that meager 10-12% difference between the Northwood and Prescott series that is mentioned there, plus disadvantages like a longer pipeline that was poorly optimized.
We have to also remember that the software of this era was not designed thinking necessarily in multiple CPU threads since that technology was still relative new in a general public environment, so a lot of the games and software that we can run there is going to behave relative similar regarding the in theory greater processing power of the Prescott model because is just not going to take advantage of that additional threads.
But… what if we keep stretching those limits a bit? Well, if we try to dive into internet or watching multimedia or more tasking content, there we can see a few differences…
Yeah, you can run Cinebench on this Pentium 4! Even with kinda low scores lol
And even if the score of the Prescott is not exactly double of the Northwood, having a second thread here is a huge plus with 0.43 points againts 0.29. But we can see a more practical showcase of the differences in this video while trying to watch YouTube:
The second part was a bit painful, right? Let say that regardless of the video card used, the bottle neck of the Northwood is HUGE compared with the Prescott when dealing with this type of tasks, the second CPU thread gives the later revision a huge advantage. You can still surf the web and get a functional experience with his machine, even with the limitations of a old Firefox version but having no problem to do things like downloading cinebench or drivers from the Nvidia site.
For the moment I will leave the 64Mb variant of the MX 4000 card installed on the IBM system while upgrading the video card of the Prescott Pentium 4 system with the FX 5200 card, that also was upgraded to 2 Gb of RAM and will remain as my main XP rig.
This adventure went from restoring a bit a rescued IBM computer to add it to my collection, to a benchmarking/testing journey that allowed me to revisit quite a few things regarding gamming of that era.
In the next one where are going travel a bit more to the past, while I will not spoil it... but for anybody visiting my Youtube channel you may find clues ;)