How about strip the case bare and spray it a sort dark green, black and brown NATO camo with some fake code numbers stencilled onto it. Make it look like real military computer?

I wouldn't bother with XP x64. Driver support is pretty average which limits its gaming ability.
If your installing 2003 then x64 is definitely an option as your not gaming on it anyway and will give you a feel of the differences in XP x64 (slight Control Panel changes and I think 64bit IE form memory?)

but I wouldn't do either....
That board supports SLI, I would go crazy and have a dual CPU, dual GPU setup, maybe even setup HDD raid with dual HDD's?
And if you wanted to go all out you could go 2 OS's x32 XP and x64 Vista or 7. (as XP wont push this to it's limits)

Not that I've given myself an idea but have a look at this link.

Woody72 wrote on 2021-04-20, 08:07:

How about strip the case bare and spray it a sort dark green, black and brown NATO camo with some fake code numbers stencilled onto it. Make it look like real military computer?

I was thinking of camo quite honestly, discussed it with my roommate and wife yesterday, so some idea's ive got.

Camo outside but leave it gunmetal inside, but clean it for sure
Paint PSU Olive Drab, and get some sort of military looking conduit to cover the power cables or buy a new PSU that has an 8pin+4pin for CPU power (never seen those before outside of a server PSU so I'll have to look)
Replace the side panel window as its cracked and broken with a custom cut glass window, won't be tempered as getting custom tempered is way outside of my price range, but normal glass should be fine
Hang up the forest camo netting inside the side panel window, I'd want it to look right but not complete block the view, but gives it military vibes
I also need to replace the front I/O as its broken on here, but the case uses a 5 1/4 bay for front IO so i can likely get a USB/Sound on a front panel cover, and drill some holes in it for power buttons, i wouldn't mind finding away to make toggles work but they'd have to be momentary switch toggles or go with the classic big red button look

chinny22 wrote on 2021-04-20, 09:06:

I wouldn't bother with XP x64. Driver support is pretty average which limits its gaming ability. If your installing 2003 then x6 […]
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I wouldn't bother with XP x64. Driver support is pretty average which limits its gaming ability.
If your installing 2003 then x64 is definitely an option as your not gaming on it anyway and will give you a feel of the differences in XP x64 (slight Control Panel changes and I think 64bit IE form memory?)

but I wouldn't do either....
That board supports SLI, I would go crazy and have a dual CPU, dual GPU setup, maybe even setup HDD raid with dual HDD's?
And if you wanted to go all out you could go 2 OS's x32 XP and x64 Vista or 7. (as XP wont push this to it's limits)

SLI crossed my mind, but even GTX 570's are expensive right now, ideally though for the insanity of this build, I'd like to see Dual GTX 480's in it, I think they fit a more military/industrial look and just make it more insane to begin with, so that's a great idea, just the cards are running at 40-50ea right now stupid miners and scalpers

As for OS, I'm still not fully decided, XP 32bit seems like a waste on here, and this is a server product, and it has full driver support from SuperMicro for XP 64bit, I checked into that, and Nvidia made drivers for xp 64bit, and I have no intentions of hooking up a printer, its other stuff that's gonna be hard, like a virtual drive

I've had good luck with XP Pro 64 when using Nvidia drivers. If Supermicro has full XP 64 drivers it's worth playing around with and trying.

I'd second giving WinXP64 a shot. I'm using it as my power XP gaming rig on a Dell dual Xeon (gtx960, 32FBDimm, Audigy2ZS).
Incidentally, you can use it as central heating, but at least that is not WinXP's fault.

I used x64 back in the day as my primary OS for gaming. Athlon 64 and ATI X800 Pro if I recall correctly.

I was using XP64 for a while. The only big gripe I remember for games was that it doesn't support 15pin joysticks. I had a nice one I wanted to use.
Something I cared much less about is it's non-support for serial/parallel ports.
I guess the other potential pitfall is if you want to run anything old enough to contain a Win16 component. Those won't work on any Win64 OS.

I think I ran into 1 or 2 situations where I had to do additional research and install a missing library or something, and it was only confusing because of the shortage of people online who ever talked about it. That kind of thing is rare though, generally if a piece of software installs on XP32 then XP64 is no problem.

I ran into one modern niche app (not a game) that was explicitly still supporting "XP" and did indeed work on XP32 but at some version stopped working on XP64 with no obvious solution.
But I also ran into a program that had dropped support for "XP", along with the usual lecture, and XP64 was still working (through no intent of the author) so it can cut both ways.
Sometimes I'd try to install an "_x86" driver or library instead of "_x64" and then be confused why nothing happened until I remembered what I was running.

Drivers were fine for me.
Epson scanner worked perfectly
NVidia GTX285 worked just as well as on XP32
Speedfan worked fine, I used it to control the GPU fan.
My Audigy2 ZS worked fine but as above, I couldn't use the joystick without downgrading to XP32.
I couldn't use my EPROM programmer with it because it needed an LPT port, but I had another system for that.

In XP64 I was able to use a game port to USB adapter with my racing wheel/pedal set.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-04-25, 00:14:

In XP64 I was able to use a game port to USB adapter with my racing wheel/pedal set.

I tried one of those (a cheap one) but the resolution was lousy. When I looked in the calibration screen under XP I noticed it was very notchy with something like 32 points of resolution or so. It made my full size CH joystick about as usable in driving games as a Playstation thumbstick, maybe even worse.
From what I read on this forum it sounded like that problem was typical of most of those adapters, so I didn't try any others.
Did you find one that doesn't suck?

Honestly it came with the racing wheel set so I didn't go out and by it separately. When I get home see if the adapter has a brand name.