First post, by KCompRoom2000
As you may know from a couple of the drive bay expansion parts (specifically the 5.25" bay drawer and the Silverstone 3.5" USB/Audio/1394 bracket) from the Bought these retro hardware today topic. I've been slowly piecing together an AMD64 build for early/mid Windows XP era gaming.
This was one of my childhood computers that we bought second-hand back in 2009, it was my daily driver for about a year and a half until it was put into hiatus due to a bit of a mishap from my younger self trying to take it apart and ended up bending the pins on the CPU. We were struggling through some personal house-related problems during this hiatus so getting this fixed had to be put in the back-burner, in the meantime I ended up with 3 different XP and Vista era systems for daily driver usage (two of which were trash-picked from my dad's workplace). By 2013 I finally got around to re-purposing this system with some spare parts I had and some parts that I bought through eBay shopping and from semi-frequent trips to RE-PC.
This computer is mainly used for playing games that are compatible with Windows XP yet are old enough to play nice with the hardware in this rig (i.e. known-compatible games from the '90s, most games from 2000-2004, and casual games up to ~2007). Here I present to you my AMD Athlon 64 build which is a close reconstruction of my childhood machine from '09.
Specifications:
Case: Some generic ATX gaming PC case from 2003 (does anyone know if it has a known model name?)
PSU: EVGA 600B 600W ATX 80-plus Bronze power supply
Mobo: ASUS A8V Full-ATX
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ @ 2 GHz (512KB L2 Cache, 200/800 MHz FSB, Socket 939, Single Core)
RAM: 2GB (2x1GB) PC-3200 DDR SDRAM
Graphics: Sapphire ATI Radeon x800 GTO 256MB AGP 8x video card
Optical: NEC ND-3520A 8x DVD-RW Drive (IDE/PATA)
Floppy: Teac 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive
HDD: 7200RPM 160GB Seagate hard drive (SATA v1)
OS: Currently dual-booting Windows XP Professional SP3 and Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP2
Some future plans for this system:
- Finding four spare 80mm fans to use the case's front and back fan holders to their full potential.
- Get a PCI Firewire card with a front panel header to make use of the front Firewire port - could come in handy if I ever want to deal with a Firewire device with support for Windows.
- Is it worth it to add some XP-era PCI Sound Blaster like an Audigy 2 or an X-Fi? If so then that may be a considerable bucket list plan.
Originally this was going to be my all-around XP gaming rig, but since there are some later XP-era games where a dual-core CPU is a necessity, this build will mainly be targeted towards older games where a single-core CPU is good enough. Newer/resource-intensive XP-era games will be played on my modified HP DC7800 desktop (a thread for that system will be coming soon).
Pictures? Well, here are a few pictures of this machine: