Win7 came out early 2009 (pre-release builds even before that). It is quite suitable for this generation. If you upgrade to a Quad Core CPU and 8GB RAM, that thing will fly.

No real reason to use Windows XP on such a system. It will hold you back in many ways (even if most games from 2005-2010 would work).

dr_st wrote:

No real reason to use Windows XP on such a system. It will hold you back in many ways (even if most games from 2005-2010 would work).

If he has the handful of games that play nice on XP only (i.e. don't work at all on Windows 7), dual-booting could make sense.

You should be aware that there are some Windows 7 updates that break compatibility with certain games that worked before the updates were around (KB3086255, I'm looking at you). I personally leave my spare Windows 7 rig (particularly my Dell Optiplex 745 which is being used for video transferring) offline and non-updated because some of the programs I rely on (In this case: an old version of Corel Videostudio) have broken compatibility due to later Windows updates.

(To those who are wondering: I am not advocating dropping updates altogether on your daily driver system. I'm just saying that it might not be necessary to use them on a spare/offline rig due to the possibility of breaking something, especially when they're not needed in this use case as the system most likely won't be networked permanently.)

I'd also vote for a dual boot -- especially if you intend to go online with Windows 7 and keep security updates up to date.

Thanks for the feedback. I was thinking most games supported XP long after 2010 so that might be the best choice even though my gut says to go with 7 to fit the hardware. Hell, this is a tough one, I'll have to think about it a bit more.

Seems like a great late XP machine to me. My philosophy tends to always begin at software and serving it with hardware, rather than doing the most justice to a given set of components, though.

Dual boot XP + 7, put 7 on a cheap SSD.

Knew it rang a bell! I've got 2 of these motherboards from work, used for CCTV PC's running WinXP x64
I used it as my daily driver running WinXP x32 until about 2 years ago when it became my "not quite Ultimate XP" PC

add a Sound Blaster X-Fi and decent Graphics card and you can max out any game and keep EAX.

Meh. For me, Windows XP is a single-core type system. When I step into dual-cores, I moved on to Windows Vista, but for a gaming machine, XP would still be better.

I didn't step into Windows 7 until the Core i-series came out. My first Windows 7 system was a Core i7-860 @2.8GHz, a quad-core with HyperThreading. GREAT gaming system, but it was 2010 after all.

Um.... with a dual core, I'd probably just go with Windows XP. It'll play all the games from that era still.

2 things I consider for XP vs 7: hardware-accelerated audio (XP) and directx 10 or higher (7). Research what you want to use (ie. which games use EAX, directx above 9, etc). If you're happy with Alchemy or just don't care, then go 7.

edit: 100 posts, woohoo! Only took 3 1/2 years!

firage wrote:

Seems like a great late XP machine to me. My philosophy tends to always begin at software and serving it with hardware, rather than doing the most justice to a given set of components, though.

Yes, but that would mean living in a dream world with all the possible HW combinations available and picking individual CPU models depending on the release date etc. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with limited things to choose from and these are the closest set of components that fit in the late -09 early -10 period. I'll have to check on a few XP/7 speed tests to see how much difference there actually is.

To be honest I'd use 32-bit Windows 10 on this machine.

Azarien wrote:

To be honest I'd use 32-bit Windows 10 on this machine.

I wouldn't. I'd use 64-bit all the way. The Radeon HD 5870 game with a guaranteed 1GB of memory. That has to come out of your 32-bit (4GB) addressable memory space. You lose that amount of system RAM as a result, meaning you're left with just under 3GB useable. If you have 4GB of memory, use it. Use 64-bit.

I will confirm, though, that a Core 2 Duo WILL run Windows 10 perfectly fine, as long as all you want to do is surf the web and play older games. But none of THOSE sames will be able to use DirectX 11, much less 12, so there''s no advantage in using Windows 10 except that it's a modern OS and has better security.

FFXIhealer wrote:

The Radeon HD 5870 game with a guaranteed 1GB of memory. That has to come out of your 32-bit (4GB) addressable memory space. You lose that amount of system RAM as a result

Is that really the case? I believe it's a common misconception. The memory window exposed by the GPU (that comes out of the address space) is smaller than the actual amount of the RAM on the GPU. Not all GPU RAM is directly addressable. Otherwise, cards with 4GB+ would be completely unusable on 32-bit systems without proper PAE (which is more or less every 32-bit non-server Windows version past XP SP1).

On my current system, the 940MX reports 2GB of RAM, but the memory resources occupied are only 256MB+32MB+1MB (according to the Device Manager).

According to my device manager for my 6GB 980ti in Windows 10 64-bit, the memory mapper only shows address ranges that total up to ~40 MB. The reason I call foul is because there's NO WAY the CPU can dump enough game data to fully load the card during gaming or rendering with only 40MB of addressable memory space, and that INCLUDES the I/O mapped portion that's only 16 bytes large.
Granted, the GPU itself tends to manage the graphics card's data as it probably has to store a lot of calculation results. But 40MB? Come on.

And don't even bring up PAE. That's on used by Server OS, not regular Windows. They flirted with it a bit during the XP days, but it was buggy and caused crashes.

So for now, let's just say: we're not 100% sure.

The last 32-bit OS I used was Windows XP and I never tried to run it on any system with more than 2GB of RAM, plus my graphics cards have all been below the 512MB line, so address space was never an issue for me. XP runs BEAUTIFULLY with 2GB of memory.

Just like Windows Vista runs BEAUTIFULLY with 4GB of RAM and at minimum a dual-core processor. I recommend a quad-core minimum for Windows 8/8.1/10 and beyond. Also, 8GB of RAM for Windows 10 - it seems to make it run more smoothly than just 4GB does.

FFXIhealer wrote:

According to my device manager for my 6GB 980ti in Windows 10 64-bit, the memory mapper only shows address ranges that total up to ~40 MB. The reason I call foul is because there's NO WAY the CPU can dump enough game data to fully load the card during gaming or rendering with only 40MB of addressable memory space, and that INCLUDES the I/O mapped portion that's only 16 bytes large.
Granted, the GPU itself tends to manage the graphics card's data as it probably has to store a lot of calculation results. But 40MB? Come on.

You're probably reading it wrong. I see 16MB+256MB+32MB (+128KB for Legacy BIOS) on my 1070Ti (Win10 x64).

You don't necessarily need a huge aperture to access VRAM. It can be something as simple as using a 256MB window, and a single byte specifying which VRAM area this maps to. This way you could address 256*256MB=64GB of video RAM, and all you'd need to do is to change a single byte value once for every 256MB of data copied; I'm not saying this is how it actually works in GPUs, because I don't know, but this would be one way to implement it.

For that build I would go with Windows XP! A high end XP machine with dual core CPU and 4gb of ram is perfectly suited for all those 2006-2009 era games! This would be more like a 2007 machine not like a 2009 with the exception of the GPU! I have several LGA775 machines and with maxed out RAM they all run /Vista7 perfectly but in all honesty 4gb ram is just too few for 64 bit Vista/7! From my point of view with 64 bit OS 4gb ram is the minimum amount not the recommended!!