Start with what you have. Then benchmark and see how it performs and make necessary changes.

Personally, up to 2006 you need a much stronger graphics card. I'm thinking 8800GT which means a PCIe system. You can slow it down by disabling cores and lowering multiplier in BIOS.

Itis too fast, i have that system yet.
I want to go only with High clocked 1 core CPU on XP 32Bit

An AGP system will struggle with games such as Doom 3, Far Cry or F.E.A.R. let alone Company of Heroes or Lost Planet.

Cores on newer CPUs can be disabled so you have a single core 😀

The Geforce 6800 Ultra should be able to handle everything released 2006 at 1280*1024 but perhaps not always at the highest settings.
Im not sure the Athlon XP is fast enough, I would go with an Asus 875P or 865PE board with a Northwood Pentium 4 3400 MHz.

Wasn't the Athlon 64 already a thing by 2004? I'd try finding a 939 board (i.e. MSI Neo2 Platinum) with a Winchester or Newcastle core Athlon 64. AGP is going to be more common here, I think. PCI Express might be a feature of some 939 boards from 2004, though I'd still stick with AGP for this build.

Back in the day i had that MSI. GREAT motherboard BUT...

DONT use the dual channel, its unstable and u will get Bsods every 1 or 2 hours.

Living wrote:

Back in the day i had that MSI. GREAT motherboard BUT...

DONT use the dual channel, its unstable and u will get Bsods every 1 or 2 hours.

I would not use the MSI 875P and 865PE boards, they are the only boards I have managed to break by overclocking.
Abit and Asus are the boards to look for when it comes to 875P and 865PE boards.

Athlon 64 is also nice but finding a good Nforce 3 board is not easy.
Nforce 4 boards are easier to find but those have PCI-E not AGP.

philscomputerlab wrote:

An AGP system will struggle with games such as Doom 3, Far Cry or F.E.A.R. let alone Company of Heroes or Lost Planet.

Cores on newer CPUs can be disabled so you have a single core 😀

Thats the games for this Build and Quake4, UT2004, NFS U2, MW and Carbon, Hitman 2,3,4 also 😀
Primary 2003-2005 games up to 2006

I had IP3-S 1.4GHz with X850XT and it performs really good in Doom3 and NFSMW

eFatal2ty wrote:

My preferences: -Socket A or 478 with latest chipsets, DDR-400 RAM, AGP8x!!! -High clocked P4 or Athlon based cpu -SATA RAID0 Dr […]
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My preferences:
-Socket A or 478 with latest chipsets, DDR-400 RAM, AGP8x!!!
-High clocked P4 or Athlon based cpu
-SATA RAID0 Drives
-MS WinXP SP2, DirectX9
-Creative sound card
-Silver+Black style

I realy dont know what to choose.

A idea:

-ABIT VT7 motherboard (socket 478,VIA PT880 chipset,DDR400 and obiviously AGP 8x & 2x SATA)
-Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz with HT (a Prescott will do wonders)
-320 or 500GB HDDs (as long as they support SATA150 mode)
-Windows 7 SP1 or Vista SP2 (SP2 is closer in performance to 7)
-Sound Blaster Live! or Audigy
-Delux MG760-BMW or Lian Li PC-S80
-your choice on video,but mine would be HD3450 AGP would be good. FX5500 if you want retro.
-FSP BlueStorm II 400W - it's going to draw some power,mainly the video card would draw some power
-512-1GB RAM - 512 for Vista and 1GB of RAM for 7.

Why VIA chipset?
I preffer prescott too
and 4x1GB DDR400
Audigy2 would be good
No WAY Vista or 7, just XP!

and I found Enermax EG465AX-VEG PSU for 15€

eFatal2ty wrote:

Why VIA chipset? I preffer prescott too and 4x1GB DDR400 Audigy2 would be good No WAY Vista or 7, just XP! […]
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Why VIA chipset?
I preffer prescott too
and 4x1GB DDR400
Audigy2 would be good
No WAY Vista or 7, just XP!

and I found Enermax EG465AX-VEG PSU for 15€

I find VIA chipsets way faster than Intel counterparts on the Socket 478/LGA775 platforms.

Also,I still don't get why people run XP on the newer VIA chipsets like PT880 and PM800 or P4M800. I run 7 on my P4M800 motherboard and it's very very fast.

And,4x1GB sticks are going to be happy in that VT7 since it has 4 DDR slots. So you get dual channel on each pair. 😀

Check this out:

It was crazy years 2004-2005 - starting LGA775, DualCores, DDR2, MultiGPUs, Watercooling, etc...!! Maybe i should build HE 2003 instead

VIA is faster on any platform it seems.

The only ones I can find slower than Intel chipsets would be KT133 and KT266A. And there come the SiS chipsets but that's another story.

Strangely,in the S478 era it's the exact opposite: i865 is slower (exceptions are 848P,865P/PE) and VIA's PT880,PM800 and P4M800 is faster.

Why you dont mention nForce chipsets too?

eFatal2ty wrote:

Why you dont mention nForce chipsets too?

Good idea,but if I'd build a nForce system,it would be nF4 939 so I guess it's out. (DFI Lanparty nF4 SLI-DR Venus or ASUS A8N-SLI)

DFI hard to find anyway

Best PC for playing games based on components made in 2004 is by far:

Athlon 64 socket 939
Radeon X800 XT PE
nForce3 MB

Stay away from VIA chipsets if you can (for all platforms). They suffer from AGP problems, SATA incompatibility and performance is usually worse than Intel / nForce.

However for 2006 games I would recommend Core 2 Duo + GeForce 8800 GTS/GTX to get the best possible performance.

PcBytes wrote:

A idea: […]
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A idea:

-ABIT VT7 motherboard (socket 478,VIA PT880 chipset,DDR400 and obiviously AGP 8x & 2x SATA)
-Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz with HT (a Prescott will do wonders)
-320 or 500GB HDDs (as long as they support SATA150 mode)
-Windows 7 SP1 or Vista SP2 (SP2 is closer in performance to 7)
-Sound Blaster Live! or Audigy
-Delux MG760-BMW or Lian Li PC-S80
-your choice on video,but mine would be HD3450 AGP would be good. FX5500 if you want retro.
-FSP BlueStorm II 400W - it's going to draw some power,mainly the video card would draw some power
-512-1GB RAM - 512 for Vista and 1GB of RAM for 7.

I love it. I had a VT7 back in the day - was a great performer, and overclocked fairly well too. 😀

As far as the build overall:

- FX 5900 is completely out of the question for 2006. It was inadequate by 2004 for heavy DX9 games like Half-Life 2 and other games, because of it's poor shader performance. For games like Oblivion, Hitman 4, etc it will be a slideshow. You could probably struggle-by with a Radeon 9, but really you want something much faster for games like Hitman 4 or Company of Heroes etc if you want high IQ settings. If you're fine playing at 800x600 with relatively low settings that's another story altogether (but the FX 5900 is still a bad option).

- AthlonXP is also out of the question; no SSE2/3 and that *will* hit you in games from 2005-onwards like Hitman 4, Oblivion, FEAR, etc.

My broad suggestions if you're going 2006-ish as your top-end and want to stay with hardware that's actually from that era:

- Athlon64 X2 or Pentium D
- GeForce 7800/7900/8600/8800 or Radeon X1800/1900 or 2900; multi-GPU at your option
- 1-3GB of RAM
- SB Audigy or X-Fi
- At least 600W PSU

The cheapest route is probably a Pentium D and a Radeon HD 2900 (they're under $30 on ebay these days, and will outperform the X1800/1900 cards that cost the same). But that will require fairly considerable power supply, especially if you want 2-3 GPUs (you're talking 700-1000W PSU now). Of course the VT7 route would be great too, just stick a 6800 GT/Ultra, 7800GS AGP, or X1k AGP in there and it should handle itself very well at lower resolutions. 😀

If you wanted to go really nuts, get an Intel 975X, Pentium D Extreme Edition, 2-3GB of DDR2 in dual-channel, a pair of Radeon HD 2900XTs, and an X-Fi. It should handle everything from the mid-2000s with no trouble. It will require *a lot* of power though.

If you want to do 2003, that's another story altogether - a high end AthlonXP with a GeForce FX or Radeon 9 is bang-on. Pentium 4 also works, but if you already have the XP go with that. 😀 If it helps any, my '03 box is setup like this:

- 2x Xeon 2.8GHz HT
- Intel 875p based Asus PC-DL
- 2GB DDR
- Audigy 2 ZS
- GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (swapping to a 6800 Ultra did very little for 3DMark01 score and has no appreciable difference for most games it runs; most of which can't even get the 5800 to spin up to full-speed)

It handles DirectX 7/8 and some early DX9 games very well - we're talking about games like Empire Earth, ORB, Morrowind, Halo PC, UT2004, etc. It can probably run the first 2 or 3 Hitman games pretty well, I just haven't tested them out yet. 😊

There was a lot of stuff that changed between '03 and '06 - DirectX 9 really took off, Vista was released, DX10 came about, memory got cheaper, and so forth. Compatibility didn't really break though - all of the games that my '03 box can run, would run fine on a Windows XP computer from 2006-7 as well. The only thing I wouldn't touch is the Audigy or X-Fi (and I prefer Audigy because the drivers are simpler to setup); they'll work well for all of the later DirectSound games, they both do EAX, etc. 😎

Great post!

Yea performance exploded in those years. Resolution for example kept getting higher and higher and it wasn't unusual for people to go from 1280 x 1024 to 1920 x 1200 in a few years.

But what's wrong with X-Fi cards? IMO they are essential for this time period with the "last hurrah" of hardware accelerated 3D audio supporting games.