There are no HD 7000 series cards in AGP, last Radeon agp card made was the HD4670 AFAIK. Nvidia released AGP Geforce 7000 cards however. In any case from my experience at least socket 754 usually has newer/better quality caps. You also have support for faster DDR400 on the 754 platform, and IIRC Socket A Athlons lack SSE2 which is important if you wish to do any modern web browsing like Facebook and Youtube while 754 chips have those instruction sets and newer. If you already have the Socket A build underway/ far along or you simply have no need for the "modern" features in the newer platform I would suggest just sticking with the Athlon XP if you enjoy it man.

There is no such thing as a AGP HD7000 series card. HD3850, HD4670 is as far as it got. Athlon 64 should beat the Athlon XP but socket 939 is stronger
than Socket 754. I think Socket 754 doesn't support dual channel ddr1 memory.

Imperious wrote:

There is no such thing as a AGP HD7000 series card. HD3850, HD4670 is as far as it got. Athlon 64 should beat the Athlon XP but socket 939 is stronger
than Socket 754. I think Socket 754 doesn't support dual channel ddr1 memory.

When comparing my s754 with my s939 rig (both used an A64 2.2GHz chip) the performance difference seemed to be negligible, especially when gaming. The difference between those 2 A64 chips and my sA 2.2GHz Barton chip was much more noticeable.

The Barton 3200+ didn't even get a noticeable performance boost in games when I upgraded the GF7600GS 256MB DDR2 graphics card to a 4670 1GB card (I used the GDDR3 variant). I still loved that rig though 😀

I have both socket a, socket 754 and socket 939 builds. In fact my current main retro-rig is a socket 939 build: Win98 Socket 939 Voodoo 2 SLi Build! (a.k.a. Glide Overkill)

There are several advantages to a socket 939 or 754 build. The are a bit cheaper and easier to find, and the're also cooler and more stable then their socket A counterparts. All socket 754/939 mainboards also have win98 drivers except for the nForce 4 witch is out of the question since you want to use an AGP card and that only comes with PCI-E. I personally use a VIA K8T800 PRO board for may voodoo 2 sli build and it's very win98 friendly (just don't try to install USB 2.0 drivers). Speed-wise an Athlon64 is a little faster then an Athlon XP at the same frequency (10-15%), and the A64 is way cooler and goes up to 2800MHz on socket 939 (Athlon FX-57). The fastest non-FX socket 939 CPUs top out at 2.4GHz and are the 3800+ venice (512kb L2) and 4000+ san diego (1mb L2).

Some 754 CPUs are very overclockable. I have a socket 754 A64 3000+ venice that effortlessly goes to 2333MHz w/o touching the voltage (233MHz x10). My 939 3800+ will go as high as 2796Mhz but requires additional voltage and proper cooling. Just remember to lower the HyperTransport and Memory clock multipliers when overclocking. I use 233FSB, set the memory to 166 in bios resulting in 199MHz memory clock and the HT multiplier to 4x resulting in 933Mhz HT clock.

Voodoo cards will also work great on it - they are not bothered about the 200Mhz fsb. They only start acting up when going over 233MHz, and not on all boards.

I also do not recommend using modern graphics cards on a machine built for old games. Some games don't like newer graphics cards. I've found that if you use anything faster then a Geforce 7900 or a radeon x1950xtx some games refuse to work (Dungeon Keeper II - black screen issue) or will not run correctly (Black and White 1 - texture corruption). 2D games like Red Alert 95 and StarCraft witch rely on older versions of Direct Draw will display color corruption on some newer cards - there are patches to fix this tough (at least for Red Alert).

I'd say, depending on what you want to play, a socket 754 Athlon 64 3000+ and a geforce 4 titanium should be perfect for games up to 2003-2004. I've played Black and White 1 FULL HD (1920x1080) on one such setup. Or you can go for a 3700+ and a Radeon 9800 PRO or a 6600 AGP. The fastest card witch will not be slowed down by the CPU is probably a 6800XT or a X850XT but these are pretty hard to find and getting more expensive by the day. Any faster and you'll need to upgrade the CPU again (Doom III, Quake 4 like really fast CPUs, lots of VRAM and are multi-core aware).

One thing that weights in favour of the Athlon 64 instead of the Athlon XP is that all A64 motherboards were designed to draw power from the 12V line, just like modern systems, so you can use a modern PSU and not worry about the 5V line not being powerful enough. Also it is easy to find SATA even on lower end Socket 754 boards, just beware some troublesome VIA chipsets that have compatibility issues with SATAII hard drives.

I believe the K8T890 chipset's associated south bridge has the sata bug, but it was fixed in later revisions. I've tested 5 K8T800 boards and none have had any problem with my WD Caviar Blue SATA II 250GB HDD, even when overclocking.

For fun, here's what a overclocked A64 3000+ socket 754 system can do with a Geforce 4 Titanium (this one uses a ALi M1698 chipset):

Results are very close to a FX 5900XT witch scores about the same.

Now for the fun part: Same video card - Leadtek Winfast A280LE TD 128MB AGP8x (Geforce 4 Ti4200) benchmarked on a overclocked athlon XP and on a stock Athlon64:

Athlon XP 2600+ (Barton) overclocked to 2180MHz (allmost 3200+ speeds): - nforce 2 chipset board (Abit NF7-S2), 1gb ddr400 in dual-channel

Athlon 64 3200+ (S939 - Venice) running at 2000MHz:

As you can see, in 3dmark alone a 180Mhz slower athlon 64 is 31% faster then the Athlon XP. Both have the same amount of L2 cache.

I've had both 462 and 754 setups in the past, and even though the 462 was a good platform for a long time, 754 is definitely a big improvement. Clock for clock, you probably have a 15-20% improvement if not more due to the better architecture, updated instructions, and larger cache. I still have a Barton setup that has been rock solid for years, but a good 754 setup with quality ram and a good power supply will be more stable and robust yet. If I already had parts for a 462 build, I wouldn't go the 754 route. But if you have both choices, or are starting from scratch anyway, it is a no brainer.

Those benchmarks make me pretty happy with what my old Motherboard can do, especially considering Via 686A chipset with SDRAM. It's giant overkill for what I've been running on it though.

My 9800 PRO scores about the same on my 2600+ (2.18GHz / nforce 2) - about 13500. The best 9800 PRO score I have is on my i865 / Pentium D 945 overclocked to 3.8Ghz:

*edited - I made a little mistake - this benchmark was made with the CPU overclocked to 3.8GHz (17x223) not the default 3.4GHz

My only true "childhood" rig is AthlonXP. I had a Celeron 1700 back in the day and wanted an Athlon so much 😀

Spec:
AthlonXP 3200+
2Gb DDR400 in Dual Channel
GA-7n400S mobo featuring nforce2 Ultra 400 chip set with SATA support
Radeon 9800Pro
Creative SB Audigy ES
250Gb Seagate HDD
etc.

The config has changed since I last took pictures: I replaced the PSU (needed a beefier 5V line) and got a fancy CPU cooler and installed a 5" rack to test and repair old HDDs. Pics:


3dmark 2000 1024x768:

ODwilly, Why do you say S754 has the advantage of DDR400? S462 3200+ by default has 200MHz FSB and thus needs DDR400 to unleash its full potential. I don't know about other chip sets, but nforce2U400 works very well with synchronous FSB/DDR ratio and switching from DDR333 to DDR400 does make a difference.

kanecvr, a note on GeForce cards, if ATI used XT to mark faster cards (9800 < 9800Pro < 9800XT), nvidia used "XT" to mark slower cards (FX5900XT<FX5900<FX5900 Ultra). So I don't really understand why you put so much emphasis on 6800 or 5900 being XT.

I always remember being much more impressed by the AXP than the A64. It wasn't till the A64X2 came out that I paid attention to AMD again, then they lost it yet again when the Core series made all kneel before it. Seeing all these benchmarks though makes me want to find a copy of 3DMark2000 and benchmark my P4. It's not the best P4, not even close, but I'd like to see what it can accomplish all the same.

Sedrosken wrote:

I always remember being much more impressed by the AXP than the A64. It wasn't till the A64X2 came out that I paid attention to AMD again, then they lost it yet again when the Core series made all kneel before it. Seeing all these benchmarks though makes me want to find a copy of 3DMark2000 and benchmark my P4. It's not the best P4, not even close, but I'd like to see what it can accomplish all the same.

Check out futuremark.com, they made everything up to 3dmark06 free. http://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/legacy

Nice! by the way were their any xp games during the athlon xp's reign that could be installed then played without the cd? the pc case i'm using will have 4 cd drives to load different games/music/anything at different times and i don't want to have to switch cd drives when loading a game when the game works only on the cd drive -letter- it was installed with.

computergeek92 wrote:

Nice! by the way were their any xp games during the athlon xp's reign that could be installed then played without the cd? the pc case i'm using will have 4 cd drives to load different games/music/anything at different times and i don't want to have to switch cd drives when loading a game when the game works only on the cd drive -letter- it was installed with.

Warcraft III with the latest patch doesn't need the CD (at least for single player), although I think most games at the time simply copied the entire game onto the hard drive, and used the CD just for copy protection.

And yes I would go with an Athlon64 build , given that games at the time didnt really have issues with faster CPUs, there are very few drawbacks to it ,plus more options, you could get an AGP board or PCIE , SATA being common etc)

RacoonRider wrote:

ODwilly, Why do you say S754 has the advantage of DDR400? S462 3200+ by default has 200MHz FSB and thus needs DDR400 to unleash its full potential. I don't know about other chip sets, but nforce2U400 works very well with synchronous FSB/DDR ratio and switching from DDR333 to DDR400 does make a difference.

Oh sorry about that! Not very familiar with the Nvidia chipsets for S462. With the older VIA chipsets that I have used RAM speeds can be picky.

Athlon 64 gets my vote 😀

ODwilly wrote:

RacoonRider wrote:

ODwilly, Why do you say S754 has the advantage of DDR400? S462 3200+ by default has 200MHz FSB and thus needs DDR400 to unleash its full potential. I don't know about other chip sets, but nforce2U400 works very well with synchronous FSB/DDR ratio and switching from DDR333 to DDR400 does make a difference.

Oh sorry about that! Not very familiar with the Nvidia chipsets for S462. With the older VIA chipsets that I have used RAM speeds can be picky.

The a64 is faster (just look at the benches I posted), quieter and cheaper. If you're building a general purpose retro rig, an A64 build can cover almost all 1997-2004 windows games and some dos games. It's also less of a hassle to put together (I can't remember how many socket A cpus I killed when installing / removing the cooler) and it will fit AM3 coolers so you don't need to go trough special lengths to find a good cooler for your machine. Most AM3 coolers will fit most 754 / 939 boards with the exception of a few bolt-trough kits witch require the four hole plastic clip (some older s754/939 boards have a two hole plastic clip bolting system).

On the other hand, if you're looking for something period correct, go for the Socket A build.

computergeek92 wrote:

Nice! by the way were their any xp games during the athlon xp's reign that could be installed then played without the cd? the pc case i'm using will have 4 cd drives to load different games/music/anything at different times and i don't want to have to switch cd drives when loading a game when the game works only on the cd drive -letter- it was installed with.

Some battlefield games (like 2 and 2142) work without a CDROM when the latest patch is installed and the UT series games have always worked for me without it ever asking for the DVDROM.
I'm sure there's others, these are just from top of my head.

RacoonRider wrote:

My only true "childhood" rig is AthlonXP. I had a Celeron 1700 back in the day and wanted an Athlon so much :) […]
Show full quote

My only true "childhood" rig is AthlonXP. I had a Celeron 1700 back in the day and wanted an Athlon so much 😀

Spec:
AthlonXP 3200+
2Gb DDR400 in Dual Channel
GA-7n400S mobo featuring nforce2 Ultra 400 chip set with SATA support
Radeon 9800Pro
Creative SB Audigy ES
250Gb Seagate HDD
etc.

The config has changed since I last took pictures: I replaced the PSU (needed a beefier 5V line) and got a fancy CPU cooler and installed a 5" rack to test and repair old HDDs.

I once had a SiS 530 board which I liked very much also and I also used it once to test harddrives (check their content, check if they had any issues and then do a format) when one of the drives instantly killed the board.

I've always used a motherboard that was expendable afterwards to prevent the tragic loss of another one of my favorites 🙁

I've decided to go with the 754 board. Chipset is VIA K8T800. Hopefully it's still there on Friday. I'm planning on maxing it out with the 3700+ and 3GB DDR 400 plus a 320GB sata hard drive. The surprise is my case will be the legendary Gateway 2000 P5-200 full tower! I found the best board that will fit the semi-proprietary built in ATX IO shield. Next I need to find the best video card for this system...

Here is what the monster case looks like:
http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTMwM1g5MjU=/z/sYsA … FVlGoF/$_35.JPG