see if you can use steamOS

From what I see in Wikipedia, the CPU (Prescott) supports 64bit though it likely is disabled unless you have a 5x1 (not sure if it is, couldn't find anything concrete on that one).
And it seems like Win10 should be working on it. Though since it doesn't support SSE4 you will have issues with many modern games that require exactly that.
Though you won't really be able to play anything demanding with it as it is a single-core CPU (2 threads thanks to it having hyper-threading) and most more demanding games require a quad-core CPU.

Many of the latter LGA 775 Pentium 4s were 64-bit.

Windows 11 has been installed on Pentium 4s before. That would need workarounds though. Officially, it should install on Windows 10 without any. The biggest hurdle these days would be for any of the more recent versions of Windows that needs the POPCNT instruction set, which the Pentium 4 lacks, so you'd probably run into real issues running it over time, if at all.

Short answer is, Windows 10 is the last one it can do without any extra work needed, and Windows 11 is possible, but going forward, it probably won't work any more.

Games are a completely different story. Those CPUs were moderately mediocre in their own time, let alone 20+ years later. You could run up to mid 2000s stuff, and after that is where it will go downhill more and more, depending on how heavy the game is.

While that may have been the highest clocked Pentium 4, it wasn't quite the fastest.

There were 6x1 and 6x2 models which doubled the L2 cache of the 6x0 models.

The Pentium 4 Extreme Editions had L3 cache (which was not common back then), and for much of the same reasons that the X3D CPUs deliver much higher gaming performance, so did those CPUs.

I would say it would be down to either the Northwood 3.46 GHz or Prescott 3.73 GHz Extreme Edition as the fastest Pentium 4 CPU.

Ram limitation. You would use your swapfile ALOT.

I have a LGA775, its a core2 quad and its a i5 8gb of ram and it a router running ipfire for the house.

yes its modded and watercooled.

Originally posted by Heatblizzard:

This is just for fun as this high end CPU never is discussed or researched very well but stand on pare score wise with a high end Intel Core 2 Duo for single threaded ratings.

I missed the first time around, but... huh?

This is nowhere near true. The slowest Core 2 based processors were often faster (or at least, not much slower) than the fastest Pentium 4s. The fastest Core 2s were therefore much, much faster. This was despite the Core 2s having lower clock speeds, and if you overclocked them (and they had far more headroom than a Pentium 4 would), then it just made the performance gap worse.

Netburst was simply a poorly competitive architecture against the competition of its time, let alone its own successor.

It's most competitive point was probably in the middle of its run after the release of the 800 MHz FSB Northwood in particular, and before the release of the Athlon 64. And if you were into overclocking in those days, then even that had a party spoiler known as "Sudden Northwoord Death Syndrome" or SNDS (which was basically the CPUs degrading in short order, very similar to how Raptor Lake did).

The Pentium 4 had three eras.

The early Willamette, was rather embarrassing as it was slower clock for clock compared to the Pentium III it was replacing, while initially not clocking much higher to make up for it, and was also very expensive as it needed expensive RDRAM. That latter point was addressed with the 845 chipset, allowing it to work with SDRAM... but then that seriously dragged performance back further as it was a seriously bandwidth hungry architecture. This is to say nothing about the Athlon/Athlon XP it was up against.

Northwood would double the L2 cache, increase the FSB further, increase clock speeds, and switch the DDR RAM. It was here that the architecture was starting to show some promise. But it didn't continue.

The late Prescott (of which yours is) had three problems; it was getting increasingly power hungry and thus heat producing (Intel had to try and pivot the industry to the BTX form factor solely to cater to their heat problems), and it further increased the pipeline stage, meaning lower IPC compared to the predecessor yet again while not reaching much higher on frequency to make up for it (Intel doubled the L2 cache to try and compensate, which had mixed results), and lastly, AMD had released the Athlon 64/Athlon 64 X2.

So that CPU is never discussed because it was never very relevant. Even if you wanted to look at "fastest" Pentium 4s, you'd not be looking at that one. You'd either be looking at the 6x1 or 6x2 models which had twice the cache, and you're probably be doing so on a late LGA 775 board well beyond Netburst's time so that the FSB could be clocked much higher (Netburst was generally very performance responsive to extra bandwidth, not just clock speed alone). Or you'd be looking at one of the Extreme Editions with added L3 cache. The only notable thing about the particular CPU you're asking about is that its clock speed was the highest Intel would ever release the Pentium 4 at. They gave up going further because the writing was on the wall and they knew it. Even at higher speeds, it was losing to the competition badly, and going higher was increasingly running into power draw/heat issues. Netburst had failed what they were after (they announced wanting to reach 10 GHz with it), and they accepted it.

Originally posted by Heatblizzard:

...what moderate to high end Steam games would work on at least medium graphics?...

None by todays standard; or that of the past decade for that matter.

It's a 20 year old CPU. GPUs were still primarily using AGP at that time.

Illusion of Progress laid it out pretty well. That was a terrible CPU in a dead-end architecture. If you got your hands on an AMD Athlon 64 X2, you might be able to do something with it. I kind of doubt it, though.

I bought a P4 Prescott 2.8GHz back in the day paired with a ATI MSI 9800 Pro+ (flashed to XT), it did the job at the time but yeah it was a mediocre chip.
Soon ditched the 9800 Pro on that PC too and got the Nvidia 6800GT at launch to play HL2 in DX9c.

Originally posted by Heatblizzard:

Either way what moderate to high end Steam games would work on at least medium graphics?

Some games from that era. Max Payne 2, Red Faction, Unreal, Morrowind, Oblivion maybe (the original version). I remember running Fallout 3 and Medieval II Total War on a Pentium 4 (Northwood) rig back in the day, so those should also work.