You could go the Athlon 64 route with Socket 939 (or even FX-55!) and the Athlon 64 4000+ on the CPU side of things. As far as GPUs go, I think the obvious choice for 2004 is the 6800GT or 6800 Ultra and you could grab a couple of them and SLI them with a proper motherboard. 1GB of RAM was also pretty high end in 2004, but you could just go nuts with 2GB. SoundBlaster Audigy 2 (or 2 ZS) was also the obvious choice for a gaming soundcard, I think X-Fi came out in 2005.
If you want to be really legit high-end, you could even look for a 2004 Western Digital Raptor HDD, but I'd advise against it 😵 .

Windows XP would be the de-facto OS, but you could also mess around with Windows XP-x64.

Radeon X800 XT / X850 XT is also good choice for 2004 build.

I'm seconding the 6800. That's high end enough for the later FarCry patches and is an ideal video card to play Doom3 on.

You could go for the P4 Northwood hyperthreaded stuff or take the AthlonXP/64 3200 route if you really wanted. Both sides are high end.

512MB-1024MB is generally what enthusiasts went for in 2004. Not many games of the time really used 512mb, though UT2004 with all players preloaded was useful with that

There's also the element of Win9x holdover to consider since XP upgrade reluctancy was still a thing and dosbox was still in its infancy. A lot of new games in 2004 still supported Win98 at the least, with Doom3 being a rare exception (which could be hexed for one byte to support it anyway 😀 )
however high-end 2004 would see 160gb hard drives that blow up in win9x/win2k if you're not careful, so xp sp1 it up anyway.

leileilol wrote:

however high-end 2004 would see 160gb hard drives that blow up in win9x/win2k if you're not careful, so xp sp1 it up anyway.

What?
I use or have used W2k with 1Tb drives in a number of systems. Never had an issue.
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For the keyboard you could use a Zboard I had one of those back in 04 the gamer keyset with the big keys was nice. Another vote for the 6800 as a GFX card also had one of those then great card ran everything very fast till Oblivion came out

PCBONEZ wrote:

I use or have used W2k with 1Tb drives in a number of systems. Never had an issue.
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in 2004 while relying hard on out-of-the-box experiences and not third-party fixes and service packs?

High end in 2004 is athlon 64. P4 neednt apply.

Asus a8n sli motherboard, single core opteron or fx cpu, 2gb of some nice ocz or corsair ram, radeon x800xt / geforce 6800 ultra, raid 0 hard disks and win XP SP2.

Actually, A64 was a top platform for the years 2003 right up to conroe came out, so the platforms were more or less the same for the period. You could go dual core and up the video card to an x1950xtx for a 2006 build. Lots of folks were using geforce g80/g92 cards in their 939 systems in 2006-8 so thats more or less period correct too if you want to build a souped up, end of era, 939 rig.

leileilol wrote:

however high-end 2004 would see 160gb hard drives that blow up in win9x/win2k if you're not careful,.

leileilol wrote:

PCBONEZ wrote:

I use or have used W2k with 1Tb drives in a number of systems. Never had an issue.
.

in 2004 while relying hard on out-of-the-box experiences and not third-party fixes and service packs?

The point was that W2k has supported up to 2TB HDDs since it was first released late in 1999.
There is no 137 Gb limit in W2k (EVER) unless you were masochistic or ignorant and were using FAT32 instead of NTFS.
Come to think. FAT32 would not be "period correct" in 2004 anyway.
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In 2004 I was using 160Gb and 250Gb drives with W2k in MANY systems.
Guess what - they don't "blow up" as you claim. Not a single one did. - And neither do 1TB drives now.
- And no third party anything was required. Never was.

Further. To be "period correct" in 2004 a W2k install would include SP4.
SP4 for W2k was released in mid 2003 so if you bought a new W2k OS CD in 2004 SP4 was already included - "out of the box".
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Windows 2000 supports 48-bit LBA addressing since SP3 in its built-in ATA driver, but you need to change a registry setting according to MS
Of course, you can just sidestep the issue entirely and install something like VIA's IDE driver for VIA motherboards and stuff like that.

alexanrs wrote:

Windows 2000 supports 48-bit LBA addressing since SP3 in its built-in ATA driver, but you need to change a registry setting according to MS
Of course, you can just sidestep the issue entirely and install something like VIA's IDE driver for VIA motherboards and stuff like that.

I don't remember ever having to do that registry edit.
I just recently set up a W2k system with four 1Tb drives and I KNOW I didn't do any reg-edits for that one.
That article specifies - Atapi.sys version: 5.0.2195.4529
With SP4 mine is - version: 5.0.2195.6891
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My whole point is that the idea that 160Gb drives "blow up" in W2k is ridiculous.
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A "period correct" PC for 2004 would be running XP with either SP1 or SP2 anyway so I don't why Win98 and W2k were even bought up.
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I've used 2 A64 rigs for several years (one with a 6800 and a second one with a 7600GS, performance of the 2 was roughly equal) and they just worked for what they are.
It's just too bad that especially the 6800's are very popular (rightfully so imo) and everyone seems to want one (or several 😜 ).

So this is a good choice afaic.

I used XP on both though, not 2k.

For a case I've used a Coolermaster Centurion 5 (2005) and 2 AOpen H600A's (2001) so these cases are not exactly period correct, they served me well. Especially the 600A case is very sturdy, but I would recommend you cut out the honeycomb ventholes and use a fan grill as this improves airflow and reduces noise by a large margin.

Maybe something like this?

Mb:ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe
CPU: Pentium 4 3.00GHz
RAM:1GB (or 512MB)
GPU:Geforce FX 5900 Ultra or Radeon 9800XT - your choice,you can go as far as 6600GT/Radeon X800
PSU:Antec 380W/FSP 350W (FSP are pretty sturdy so wattage isn't a concern)
OS:Windows XP SP2 (or SP3 if it was available back then)
HDD: probably 60 to 80GB or even more,SATA if you want fancy stuff
Case: Lian Li or Antec Sonata,or even Directron AX-01SLD (which is actually an Antec case)

I understand when systems are build for an OS, concrete applications, CPU class, but for a year...

/\ Nostalgia... It doesn't have to make sense, as long as you enjoy yourself ^^

alexanrs wrote:

/\ Nostalgia... It doesn't have to make sense, as long as you enjoy yourself ^^

This *thumbsup*

And about XP, does installing SP3 really add any benefits on top of SP2 except for maybe extra security updates?

Some newer programs refuse to run without SP3, but for what you all seem to want to do, SP2 suffices so long as you aren't going to be browsing with it.

Tetrium wrote:

alexanrs wrote:

/\ Nostalgia... It doesn't have to make sense, as long as you enjoy yourself ^^

This *thumbsup*

And about XP, does installing SP3 really add any benefits on top of SP2 except for maybe extra security updates?

I would not recommend SP3 unless you absolutely need it SP3 encrypts certain folders so if the XP wont boot and can't be repaired you may not be able to get files on the HD if you plug it into another machine. Unless a program requires SP3 the only other reason I can think of is running GFWL

Sedrosken wrote:

Some newer programs refuse to run without SP3, but for what you all seem to want to do, SP2 suffices so long as you aren't going to be browsing with it.

stuvize wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

alexanrs wrote:

/\ Nostalgia... It doesn't have to make sense, as long as you enjoy yourself ^^

This *thumbsup*

And about XP, does installing SP3 really add any benefits on top of SP2 except for maybe extra security updates?

I would not recommend SP3 unless you absolutely need it SP3 encrypts certain folders so if the XP wont boot and can't be repaired you may not be able to get files on the HD if you plug it into another machine. Unless a program requires SP3 the only other reason I can think of is running GFWL

Cheers! 😁
It'll save me some extra time, even though I've already made slipstreamed XP install media with either SP2 or SP3 in the past using nlite

stuvize wrote:

........ SP3 encrypts certain folders so if the XP wont boot and can't be repaired you may not be able to get files on the HD if you plug it into another machine. Unless a program requires SP3 the only other reason I can think of is running GFWL

In my experience that isn't true.
I've never paid any attention to what SP3 encrypts (if anything) but I've never run into a case where files that needed salvaged were inaccessible due to a default encryption.
There could perhaps exist an odd way to setup and/or recover things where such a problem is created, but I haven't seen it.
I can access anything that would need recovered on my XP-SP3 installations from the other OS in dual boot setups or from another PC on the LAN.
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If the installation is so buggered that a repair install won't work - that's likely the fault of the HDD, not SP3.
And that wouldn't be any different from SP1,2, or none or another OS. It's not unique to SP3.
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If you are worried about the situation where an installation gets so buggered you have to reformat the OS drive, there is an easy way around losing your data.
Put the OS on a small first partition and put the data on a different partition.
That way (baring a failed/failing HDD) even if you have to reformat your OS partition your data is not touched and is accessible.
- Even if the OS remains unusable (unrepairable) you can still get to your files by using a different OS installation. (By dual-boot or using a using different machine.)
You do have to use a little common sense and back-up some select things (bookmarks, passwords, etc...) to your data drive but that isn't unique to SP3 either.
I also NEVER use the MS provided "My Documents". Instead I create a folder "MyDocs" on the data drive, then put a link to it in MS's My Documents.
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