The pentium 4’s highest bandwidth anywhere was 48GB/s through the L2 cache. The PCIe 5.0 x16 on an RTX 5060 Ti can do roughly 64 GB/s in each direction. Obviously the bandwidth in and out of the Pentium 4 are quite a bit lower than the fastest thing in the whole chip… so there’s no feasible way for a pentium 4 to deliver the maximum bandwidth to a 5060 Ti.
Also, the early Pentium 4 CPUs didn’t have EM64T, so the maximum addressable memory was 4GB. So some Pentium 4 CPUs are unable to use all the memory on a 5060 Ti. This almost makes it sound like one of these personified hardware components is irrational…








To copy things into GPU memory from system memory, the CPU needs an address to copy it to. There are some ways around the 4GB limit with e.g. PAE, but the limitation that a single application can only use 32 bits of memory addresses applies regardless. With CUDA there’s definitely ways to fill the memory of the GPU with something - you might even be able to make limited use of it - but it’s not all addressable at once from any general context, and it won’t be useful for gaming purposes in any way I’m aware of.
I guess it’s also worth a mention that some Pentium 4 systems didn’t have PCIe - just the prior PCI, so there might need to be some kind of adapter thing in the picture for this to work out at all, and I don’t know whether those do some kind of DMA, impersonation of the older standards, or something else entirely.
It probably just isn’t a good idea to connect a modern GPU to a 25 year old processor.