infiniteclouds wrote on 2020-04-30, 20:04:

If you're looking to have the fastest system that can run the very first games that had "Windows 7" listed on them and the very last games to not have "Windows 10" listed on them than I could not recommend against ATI cards strongly enough. There are early Windows 7 era games 2009-2010 that will have issues on your VII, if their other cards are any indication. Personally I hate nvidia and the utter nonsense of them charging nearly +100% prices over 5 years ago even though the cryptocraze demand is OVER but their cards are way better for backwards compatibility. I would like to see some data of how the Turing cards perform with early Windows 7, though.

My current Windows 7 PC is a 2840K Ivy-E and a Titan Black which I will likely never upgrade because I use this machine as a dual-boot for 'fastest officially supported Windows XP".

I am playing Unreal Gold, Deus EX, System Shock 2 without any problems. And all this in marvelous 2560x1600 res!
In far future i have a plan to test out 64-core/128-thread cpu under Win7.

Sorry for the necro post, but it seems the best thread I can find for this. I went the Intel route. A 10980xe with full VROC build (10 TB NVME) , RTX 3080, 64GB of ram and a SB AE5 sound card all in a Phantek Enthoo 2 case with vertical mounts. It is almost the fastest there is with out of the box compatibility for Intel. There is a onsite NVME backup of the boot drive using the chipset lanes and 2 4TB SATA backups for all the other programs. There is also a Win10 NVME using chipset lanes. The X299 Asus Prime Deluxe is the mobo I use.

However I recently started playing older W7 games and I have broken compatibility with the massive thread counts (about 10 games so far) so I am finishing building a more targeted gaming machine with a 9600K at 5.1-5.3 Ghz, 2080 TI and 16 GB of RAM with all nvme , about 6-8 TB worth of games., which covers most of the best games from 1995-2020. It will work with about everything without messing with core compatibility issues.

In the overkill Intel rig I can use the existing VROC I created in Win 7 with a Win10 NVME boot drive so I don't have to redo anything for W10 for it to work for most things, especially Steam games. So it is a pretty nice compromise I think.

I am still daily driving a AMD FX-8350 on windows 7.

I hardly call the OP's system retro, especially when the OP post was from 2019.

shaq wrote on 2024-03-29, 16:28:

Sorry for the necro post, but it seems the best thread I can find for this. I went the Intel route. A 10980xe with full VROC build (10 TB NVME) , RTX 3080, 64GB of ram and a SB AE5 sound card all in a Phantek Enthoo 2 case with vertical mounts. It is almost the fastest there is with out of the box compatibility for Intel. There is a onsite NVME backup of the boot drive using the chipset lanes and 2 4TB SATA backups for all the other programs. There is also a Win10 NVME using chipset lanes. The X299 Asus Prime Deluxe is the mobo I use.

However I recently started playing older W7 games and I have broken compatibility with the massive thread counts (about 10 games so far) so I am finishing building a more targeted gaming machine with a 9600K at 5.1-5.3 Ghz, 2080 TI and 16 GB of RAM with all nvme , about 6-8 TB worth of games., which covers most of the best games from 1995-2020. It will work with about everything without messing with core compatibility issues.

In the overkill Intel rig I can use the existing VROC I created in Win 7 with a Win10 NVME boot drive so I don't have to redo anything for W10 for it to work for most things, especially Steam games. So it is a pretty nice compromise I think.

I was just thinking a 10980XE would be some silly fun to have with Windows 7, but that's confusing needs with wants. I did recently put my GB Z390 Aorus Master back to work with a delidded 8350K at 5GHz on Win7 with a 1080Ti, and it's stupid fast. For the games I would play of that era (Force Unleashed 1 and 2, Dirt 2 and 3, Crysis), having more cores likely wouldn't be any benefit. And even then, the only game that seems to need any tweaking to run in Win10 is Dirt 2 as you have to do a workaround to disable the Games for Windows Live issues.

I was amazed how easy it was to get Win7 running on it. The only thing I'm missing is the WiFi driver but I'm running ethernet so it's a non-issue. Only thing I could try to change is to install under UEFI, but I'm not sure it's worth the trouble.

As far as the "retro" designation, meh, whatever. The hardware sure isn't, but Win7 is obviously past its prime. Probably wouldn't call it "vintage" either. I'll just call it having fun with modern hardware on older OSes at ludicrous speeds.

My daily driver is Windows 7 on Ryzen 5800x, Msi x470 board and gtx1080. I had to slipsteam some updates and nvme drivers into my W7 install disk, and it installed no problem. Then had to find the right USB driver for the controller on the cpu. It's been running without problems for a few years now.

Let's talk about retro 1st threadripper systems in 2044 again...