Intel gets my vote 😀

That motherboard is legendary and a that P4 has plenty of speed.

I would go with XP, but not past SP1 for performance reasons. I doubt there are many DX7/8 games that don't run on XP.

The A64 is better than the P4 on all possible front (to formulate better, the P4 is under anything on everything anyways)
The nforce 3 were pretty good motherboard, so no reason to steer away from it like a vulgar VIA 😁

I ran a 3400+ S754 + nForce 3 as my main rig for 2 years between my P3S 1266 and my Q6600, with a X800XT.
I had nothing to complain about, except those inacceptably high benchmarks for such low prices compoared to P4s.

Would the Ti4600 scale with a faster CPU the way some older video cards did?

I personally don't really care either way which of these form the basis for the build, I'm just looking for stability and no sluggishness in Windows. For gaming in the period I've pegged on this, either one has more than enough oomph.

senrew wrote:

Would the Ti4600 scale with a faster CPU the way some older video cards did?

That's only an issue if you like benchmarking 100+ fsp 😀

Don't overlook the Radeon 9800. Gave Nvidia a very hard time back in the day. With those cards you quickly become GPU limited. Technology back then exploded and the resolution race was in full swing.

So, once again, it comes down to the exact games you would like to play. Then just google old benchmarks and see what cards give you 60+ fps.

Had a chance to do some more research on the two different motherboards.

The ASUS will accept up to a P4 EE 3.4ghz beast, and the Gigabyte board will take a Clawhammer A64 3700+. I'm guessing the P4 would be the better chip in that regard when it comes to playing games?

Would there be a more powerful video card for specifically running dx7/8 games? I know the Ti 4600 is legendary around here, but it'd be nice to know if there was a more powerful option that retains compatibility without sacrificing in order to support newer dx9 hardware requirements.

In terms of performance I doubt it makes a difference. So I would focus on other things such as features of the board, stability, access to drivers, things like that.

Compatibility with games will differ from game to game. Popular titles should work fine on newer drivers, but rare or non-mainstream games might have issues.

Preferably is a driver that's like half a year older than a game. Often the release notes give interesting clues.

Extrapolating from the test scores found at http://techreport.com/review/6459/intel-penti … hz-processors/5 I think it's fair to say that in actual games a A64 3700+ would match or exceed the Pentium 4 EE 3.4ghz.

Good, cause the A64 chip is way cheaper 😀

The only feature I'd be giving up over the p4 is dual channel ram but eh.