I dont know it can be called retro.
Some time ago I built a year 2006 "summer system" that dosn't produce much heat during the summer compared to my main system.
The original spec was an E6700 (Conroe retail) clocked at 3.33 @1.2V running on an Asus Commando P965 motherboard and a Geforce 7900 GTX. The power consumtion while gaming was 180W - 200W from the wall.
The people I game with wanted me to run Discord so I had to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. I upgraded to a Geforce 8800GTX and switched to my Asus P5W DH Deluxe i975X motherboard at the same time as this was the motherboard I bought back in August 2006.
The 8800 GTX was whisper quit and using V-sync the power consumtion was only a little bit higher than with the 7900 GTX, 190W - 210W. Not good enough I thought, how can I keep the performance and compatibility with an unnamed quirky DX9 online game while reducing the power consumtion?
I turned my attention to a Geforce "9800 GTX+" = "GTS 250" (same card), the last of the first generation "Tesla" video cards the original 8800 GTX belongs to. The second generation Tesla cards such as the GTX 285 would also have worked compatibility wise but now the idea was to reduce power draw.
The 9800 GTX+ / GTS 250 reduced the power draw to ~175W while gaming with V-sync enabled at 75hz but the cooler sucks/blows and if I wanted to keep the card under 75C I had to endure alot of noise. Cleaning the cooler and replacing the paste did not help much, I turned my attention to the video cards BIOS.
The card used to run 1.0V in 2D mode and 1.3V in 3D mode. As adding custom voltage settings is not trival if even possible I simply edited the BIOS to use the 1.0V 2D voltage in 3D mode aswell with the help of NVbitor. I also reduced the 3D clocks to 600 MHz core 1500 MHz shader and 1800 MHz memory as I doubt the card can handle its stock clocks when running at 1.0V.
The performance should still be close to the 8800 GTX even if the memory bandwidth is lower. The system now only draws 140W from the wall while gaming and the video card stays cool and quiet. Not bad for an overclocked year 2006 system with a video card that at least uses 2006 tech even if it's a die shrink.
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.