Well you'll still need a graphics card if you want D3D/OGL/glide and audio so you'll need at least 2x pcie slot or thunderbolt,oculink,m.2 connection to an external enclosure.

You can setup proxmox on a matx motherboard and throw any OS you want on it and passthrough the pcie GPU and pcie audio to XP. Configure it to boot the VM on startup and it would be the same as if it was running on bare metal. As far as power usage size the PSU correctly, downvolt and underclock and it would be pretty minimal.

The smallest you'll get with the above is a case that would fit an MATX motherboard.

You may be able to go mini-itx and eliminate another PCIe slot by passing through an emulated sound card to host pulse audio but likely wouldn't be ideal and it wouldn't be much of a size difference, IMO.

The advantage of this config is you can use the same computer for both old and new operating systems since you could pass through the motherboard audio and video to a newer OS.

You could try looking for Shuttle XPC units. Finding Win98-friendly ones is a challenge, but there should be a lot more XP-friendly models out there... try to find a later model one from the late 2000s...

Edit: I just did a search on eBay and the first thing that turned up were Ivy Bridge units. i.e. the last officially-supported chipset for XP.

The Shuttle XPC barebone units suggested above are quite nice, got a G41/C2D E8300 based one (SG41J4). Sure, it's far bulkier than a NUC or similar, but still fractions of the size of an ATX or mATX rig. There's room for a reasonably powerful GPU, but take measurements and make sure it fits before buying anything. The PSU is on the weak side as expected in a small form factor barebone computer, but there are variants with larger PSU, you might want to read up some and look for one of those.

The BIOS is also somewhere in between the full blown ones with myriads of fine tuning options found in enthusiast mobos and the crippled ones in OEM equipment. Mine even has a few overclocking options. If you're willing to do some BIOS hacking, you can unlock some additional useful options.

If you got power consumption and heat generation in mind, the newer computer, the better, as long as the OS you want to run is supported. Newer hardware will generally use less power to do the same work. Those Ivy Bridge based ones would probably be a good choice for XP. If you want W98 support out of the box, you'll basically have to look for something Netburst based. Then forget power efficiency and cool running. In my experience, it's possible to get almost any W98 game running in XP too though.

Another option could be to look into AMD APU based stuff. Got almost no personal experience of those, so can't give any specific tips, but I know Zotac used those in their Zbox series. If there's something suitable for XP gaming available, it's probably as small as it gets.

theshinyknight wrote on 2024-05-22, 01:13:

I would like to have a small computer to run old XP games; nothing fancy, not planning to run Crysis or anything like that, but more like early 2000 games at 1280x1024 resolution or 1600x1200 at most.

If you don't need full native Win98 or DOS compatibility then you have a lot more options and can go much smaller than mATX!

kaputnik wrote on 2024-05-22, 07:39:

Another option could be to look into AMD APU based stuff. Got almost no personal experience of those, so can't give any specific tips, but I know Zotac used those in their Zbox series. If there's something suitable for XP gaming available, it's probably as small as it gets.

I wanted something similar and went down the mini-ITX route with an AMD APU and really pleased with the results. I picked up an MSI DDR3 miniITX Socket FM2+ board and an A8 5500 APU, which I had found was the final core generation to have full WinXP drivers for the graphics. With 4Gb RAM (maximum for 32-bit XP?) and a SATA SSD it flies in almost everything I've thrown at it. I've got it in one of the "A09" book sized cases from AliExpress, which has a FlexATX PSU within the case (no external power brick) and is about the size of a thick hardback novel! Thread about it here.

HP T740 thin client has a 4c/8t Ryzen 1756 with embedded Radeon Vega 8. It also has a PCIe x16 slot which can take graphics cards up to 45-ish watts as long as they fit within the form factor (Nvidia T600 fits in the power and space envelope - approx equivalent to GTX 1050TI / GTX 1650).

Not sure about XP driver support for the onboard hardware, but if the hardware is supported then it's a very small system which still has good IO support (1x NVMe, 1x SATA M.2) and dedicated graphics capability.

It is a few years old now, so might be difficult to track down. I ran one for a few months under LInux and it was quite sprightly and able to play quite modern games. THe only reason I ditched it was that under Linux the cpu fan speed control didn't function, so was fixed at 100% == noisy!

kaputnik wrote on 2024-05-22, 07:39:

If you want W98 support out of the box, you'll basically have to look for something Netburst based. Then forget power efficiency and cool running. In my experience, it's possible to get almost any W98 game running in XP too though.

I went looking for 98SE Shuttle XPCs a while back, and... the pickings were slim. Lots of NetBursts but typically PCI-E/DDR2 i915 systems, and even on the dark side (mostly socket 462), it was more nForce and less VIA, and... I gather that the consensus around here is that nForce is not where you want to go for a retro system.

I think I managed running 98SE on nForce 2 w/ IGP, on a Award crossflashed ASUS A7N8X-VM/400 (BIOS used Chaintech 7NIF2) . No issues whatsoever and was hella snappy with a Duron 1600.

If anything and those Shuttle use the Crush17/18 flavour of nForce, they're good for 98 IMO - you get a Geforce 4 MX440 integrated (although with slightly less RAM than a normal card.) and usually AC97 audio to go with it.

Take a look at mini ITX boards. Depending on your requirements they can be stuck into some very small cases. A board with say an AMD E-350 can do basic 3D acceleration and fits into an enclosure not much larger than the board+ATX I/O plate (tip: picoPSU). If you want more power, go for a board with a T-series Core CPU and PCIe 16x slot, and a case with a riser that lets you use a modest PCIe card in flat orientation.

Thanks! Lots of great suggestions here.
Where possible I would go for something like a mATX for sure, although as you pointed out, the whole thing fall apart when you factor the GPU and power supply; which for the appropriate era, are still huge sadly. I am not expecting something exactly as big as a NUC, but close enough to fit in a small space under my monitor, instead of taking another large space under the desk as if it was my main PC.

Not interested in neither native DOS or W98 compatibility; I have a pure DOS machine and same for a W98 machine, so those are covered; but I have no XP machine so I really wanted something to cover that range. So would an A6 or A8 CPU with Radeon GPU integrated, be enough to run games? I remember those being quite pathetic for running anything (same for the integrated GPU on the 2nd gen Intel CPU); not looking to get a GTX 980 but would like something that at least can run things like Unreal Tournament, Operation Flashpoint, Shogo, Prince of Persia SOT and similar games at a decent framerate 😀

Even if this machine is running only XP for just games, I am fine with it, I have my main PC for work and doing everything else; that's why I want to get the smallest I can get and don't spend a fortune, since it has to cover only a very limited number of games that are between my W98 machine and my modern PC. I remember I had a shuttle with a P4; it was a great machine 😀

It really depends on what level of compatibility you want and how small you want to go.

Shuttle XPCs are small they usually have room for a single slot graphics card as well as a sound card.
You can also try small form factor OEM builds like the Dell Optiplex 7010 or 790. These have 2 expansion slots, but you most likely can't use a sound card and a graphics card at the same time because of cooling.

You could also just build something, but it most likely won't be as small. Some pointers made here:
Re: P4 Build Looking for Thoughts & Feedback for Future Changes
You can also base your build on the smaller cases from here:
Re: Modern Retro PC cases, whats your favourites?
There are also some pointers for a compact XP build here:
Re: Small PC options

Or you can get a notebook. My tinkering laptop is an Elitebook 8470p which have plenty of power of the XP era games and should technically be XP compatible (Ivy Bridge, Radeon GD7570 GPU), but I never tried to run XP on it. Probably no drivers from HP and you need to hunt them down one by one from the chipset manufacturers.

theshinyknight wrote on 2024-05-22, 01:13:

I would like to have a small computer to run old XP games; nothing fancy, not planning to run Crysis or anything like that, but more like early 2000 games at 1280x1024 resolution or 1600x1200 at most.

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/

Good place to start.

Eg I built a 98 + voodoo box from this:
https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t5720/

But you might prefer something like this:
https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/gt7725/

dionb wrote on 2024-05-22, 22:10:

Take a look at mini ITX boards. Depending on your requirements they can be stuck into some very small cases. A board with say an AMD E-350 can do basic 3D acceleration and fits into an enclosure not much larger than the board+ATX I/O plate (tip: picoPSU). If you want more power, go for a board with a T-series Core CPU and PCIe 16x slot, and a case with a riser that lets you use a modest PCIe card in flat orientation.

So an E-350 or similar is actually viable for at least light XP gaming?

Used to have a Zotac AD04 equipped with a slightly more powerful E-450 APU as HTPC . It never gave me any trouble whatsoever, and I never used it for anything else, hence my inexperience with AMD APU:s when it comes to gaming. Replaced the AD04 with a RPi 4 when those were released. While I do realize an RPi has HW decoding support for modern formats, it blew the AD04 out of the water in the OpenGL rendered menus aswell. Thought the E-450 was far too weak for anything gaming related, even old XP era stuff.

Might dig the AD04 up again - should have kept it somewhere - and try it out just for fun 😀

kaputnik wrote on 2024-05-23, 11:41:

So an E-350 or similar is actually viable for at least light XP gaming? […]
Show full quote

dionb wrote on 2024-05-22, 22:10:

Take a look at mini ITX boards. Depending on your requirements they can be stuck into some very small cases. A board with say an AMD E-350 can do basic 3D acceleration and fits into an enclosure not much larger than the board+ATX I/O plate (tip: picoPSU). If you want more power, go for a board with a T-series Core CPU and PCIe 16x slot, and a case with a riser that lets you use a modest PCIe card in flat orientation.

So an E-350 or similar is actually viable for at least light XP gaming?

Used to have a Zotac AD04 equipped with a slightly more powerful E-450 APU as HTPC . It never gave me any trouble whatsoever, and I never used it for anything else, hence my inexperience with AMD APU:s when it comes to gaming. Replaced the AD04 with a RPi 4 when those were released. While I do realize an RPi has HW decoding support for modern formats, it blew the AD04 out of the water in the OpenGL rendered menus aswell. Thought the E-450 was far too weak for anything gaming related, even old XP era stuff.

Might dig the AD04 up again - should have kept it somewhere - and try it out just for fun 😀

Well I wouldn't try to run Crysis on it... the question is how light 'light' is.

Here are some benchmarks:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazo … 0-benchmarked/4

TLDR: IGP is comparable to a bandwidth-starved Radeon HD5450, the CPU is comparable to a low-end K8, and something like Starcraft 2 will play OK until the CPU starts sweating.

I also never did any gaming on mine, I used the board for home server combined with media PC, connected to a beamer.

dionb wrote on 2024-05-23, 12:07:

Well I wouldn't try to run Crysis on it... the question is how light 'light' is.

Well, I definitely would. Not playing it, just try it, at least the demo. Back in the day I experienced Crysis on a 2.4GHz Northwood Celeron and Radeon 9600 Pro, I played half way through it with 11fps. It can't be worse than that.

In general, these thin client tier CPUs/APUs are very limited. I'd expect they play well AAA games up to 2002 maybe 2003 in general and maybe some very light AAA games up to 2005. My T630 thin client is much more powerful than the E350 and it does okay for what it is in mid-2000s titles, but it's not XP compatible.
Mid-noughties adventures on a modernish thin client
(note to self, I should get back to editing p-states and also try Crysis demo)

Thanks for the link, @randomStranger 😀 That site is quite a trove of info; I wish they had also info about which OS can run on which machine 😁 I saw the majority of them seems capable of linux, and some of them could run 98, so I can give a try with XP, but need to cross reference the vendor website to see if they have drivers for XP. That is the reason why I didn't go for thin clients as they are incompatible for most part, so you end up with a great machine with a great form factor that use like 20W, that should blow out of the water a 2000-era computer at a fraction of the power, but that has no driver support for DX9, Glide and run even simpler games poorly.

That was what pushed me to get era-appropriate machines for my DOS and W98 gaming machines; the problem is that now I ran out of space and I still need a XP machine, hence the requirement for the smallest most compact thing I can find. whoever makes new hardware that support 98 and XP will most likely make a ton of money I guess, as a retro-gamer I will throw money at this person for sure 😜

BTW If I would consider a laptop, what would be a decent enough laptop that could run XP AND games? I remember that in the early 2000s the gaming laptop were not that many and mostly 8 pounds+ beasts, which were as big as a portable in the 80s... I could easily fit a laptop somewhere on my desk if it is thin, as I don't even care for the LCD in the end, but the concern is that they may not even be powerful enough to run RTS games

theshinyknight wrote on 2024-05-23, 16:03:

Thanks for the link, @randomStranger 😀 That site is quite a trove of info; I wish they had also info about which OS can run on which machine 😁 I saw the majority of them seems capable of linux, and some of them could run 98, so I can give a try with XP, but need to cross reference the vendor website to see if they have drivers for XP.

Sure, but check the chipset manufacturers too. My T630 does not have W7 drivers from HP, I got the drivers from AMD.

theshinyknight wrote on 2024-05-23, 16:03:

BTW If I would consider a laptop, what would be a decent enough laptop that could run XP AND games? I remember that in the early 2000s the gaming laptop were not that many and mostly 8 pounds+ beasts, which were as big as a portable in the 80s... I could easily fit a laptop somewhere on my desk if it is thin, as I don't even care for the LCD in the end, but the concern is that they may not even be powerful enough to run RTS games

It seems the Elitebook 8470p does work with XP so it's a decent pick if it has the dedicated graphics card like mine.
https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Operat … XP/td-p/5776217
I run mine on Linux but even then it runs games like Far Cry (1) with maxed out graphics settings well through Steam Proton and that was.

Otherwise any business class notebook with dedicated GPU at least as fast as the GT240 which you can confirm working with XP should do the job.

So, you were saying you've tried some HP thin clients? Which ones? Will the T610 Plus do the trick for you? Or too slow?

I've been wondering about HP T620. Does it have Windows XP drivers for GCN 2.0 GPU?

https://www.driverscape.com/download/amd-rade … 8tm%29-hd-8280e

Allegedly. I wouldn't trust that at face value though.