Very neat - would've been very rad back in ~2004 as well. As far as cool suggestions, I'd add an Audigy card of some sort (those were pretty slick back then), and some intake/exhaust fans, but otherwise it should be well equipped for early-2000s gaming. The X800's lack of SM3 will probably disqualify it from games before you'd run out of performance, but there's a handful of games that have SM2.0b paths (which is specifically for the X800/X850), and many that support SM2.0 (pre-DX9c) that it should be able to play quite well.

Also, is it me, the picture, or is that X800 actually curved/bent? 😲

The card is fine, I think the camera was a bit tilted so it gave this impression. 😁

I can pop in either a 5.1 Live or a Vortex2. Almost all of my old machines use exclusively parts that were given to me/scavenged, I just buy the PSUs since most machines where I live come with crappy generic ones.

Fir this machine I wouldn't consider the Live or Vortex 2. An Audigy, Audigy 2 or X-Fi are more suitable 😀

Hmm. I'll have to look for one of those on local ebay. One thing I forgot to ask: What about video drivers? Since it's a XP rig, can I just use the latest from the manufacturer's site or I'd be better with an old version?

Snayperskaya wrote:

Hmm. I'll have to look for one of those on local ebay. One thing I forgot to ask: What about video drivers? Since it's a XP rig, can I just use the latest from the manufacturer's site or I'd be better with an old version?

That depends on the game. Many games should work fine with the latest driver. But others might break with a new driver and a more period correct driver will likely resolve the issue.

Second or third the Audigy 2 or Audigy 2 ZS recommendation. However your chip is 2005 right? That would put it in X-Fi territory.

Live would be fine, but Audigy would be nicer. X-Fi may be era accurate but personally I'd pass (I don't like the drivers and IME Audigy 2 ZS is right there with sound quality and hardware features).

On drivers - for an ATi card I'd just grab the latest and greatest, generally speaking. On the X series having newer (not the absolute newest is required) drivers will enable temporal and transparency AA (both look great IMO; I'm not sure if the single X800 can run them together and get decent performance across the board though). I've honestly not experienced much in the way of "I updated my Radeon's drivers and XYZ broke" as I have with GeForce cards (even today).

EDIT: posted this in the wrong thread by accident.