VOGONS


Fastest Windows XP System

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Reply 40 of 121, by DrSwizz

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awgamer wrote:

Looking at other cpu-z shots of phenom ii I know fsb is 200 default. What's the lowest multiplier? At 200fsb & .5 mult you're at a possible 100 MHz. A little lower and an ISA slot and it could be an alternate for a pentium dos machine.

You can underclock the HT ref. clock also:
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Reply 41 of 121, by awgamer

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An fx-8350 at 49.5 is about equivalent to a Pentium @ 76 MHz. Drop it to 43 Mhz to roughly match a Pentium 66. Only thing left missing are ISA slots. Can you turn off caches? Maybe be able to get down to 386/486 speeds.

Reply 42 of 121, by Tetrium

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awgamer wrote:

An fx-8350 at 49.5 is about equivalent to a Pentium @ 76 MHz. Drop it to 43 Mhz to roughly match a Pentium 66. Only thing left missing are ISA slots. Can you turn off caches? Maybe be able to get down to 386/486 speeds.

Oh noes, I'd better sell all my Super 7 stuff quickly! 🙁

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Reply 43 of 121, by clueless1

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I know this is not the fastest, but I just finished refurbishing my new XP retro rig. It's based off of the Asrock 4coredual-VSTA mainboard. I bought this new when it came out and have held onto it since. It accepts DDR1 or DDR2 memory and it has both AGP and PCI-X slots. The PCI-X slot will only run at x4. The other quirk with this board is the VIA® PT880 Ultra Chipset has a 3.2GB RAM limit. This is not the same as the 32-bit non-PAE limit, as I've experienced the limitation with various 64-bit linux distros. Currently, I have it set up as so:
Pentium E2180 (2.0Ghz) overclocked to 2.67Ghz.
4GB DDR2 (effective 3.2GB)
GeForce 8800GTX PCI-X (limited to x4)

It's very fast for an XP rig and can handle any XP-era games easily. The only game that gave me fits was FlightGear, which was so choppy that I think there was a compatibility issue somewhere, rather than a performance bottleneck.

I plan to use this rig for GOG games.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
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Reply 44 of 121, by y2k se

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SPBHM wrote:

so realistically it's easy to use the same system with dual boot for new windows 10 games and windows XP games.

It not realistically easy for me to use the same machine for WIn10 and WinXP racing games. Some of the XP games will not handle the controller configuration and three monitor setup.

I'll probably build an H61 + Sandy/Ivy Bridge i3 system. All of the XP games I will run are single-threaded and NASCAR Racing 2003 Season could tax my overclocked i5-3570K with all graphic options enabled.

Tualatin Celeron 1.4 + Powerleap PL-IP3/T, ASUS P2B, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 4 Ti 4200, Voodoo2 SLI, AWE64, 32GB IDE SSD, Dell 2001FP

Reply 45 of 121, by SPBHM

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awgamer wrote:

Mobile versions of core 2 had chips with 133 & 166 fsb so depending on your board you should be able to get a desktop that low. 6x133/800mhz, 6x166/1ghz.

for C2D mobile I think the lowest was 166 (like my t7200), but I think most people would run desktop chips so the lowest was 200, yes you can manually underclock the fsb, but most of the time it requires a reboot (I don't consider things like setfsb reliable enough), while with AMD it's really easy to go under 1Ghz with just a software on windows anytime

y2k se wrote:
SPBHM wrote:

so realistically it's easy to use the same system with dual boot for new windows 10 games and windows XP games.

It not realistically easy for me to use the same machine for WIn10 and WinXP racing games. Some of the XP games will not handle the controller configuration and three monitor setup.

I'll probably build an H61 + Sandy/Ivy Bridge i3 system. All of the XP games I will run are single-threaded and NASCAR Racing 2003 Season could tax my overclocked i5-3570K with all graphic options enabled.

I think triple screen gaming is not supported by the XP drivers for AMD at least, not sure about Nvidia, so it's just a question of disabling the extra monitors?
as for controllers what do you mean? I have the same gamepad and wheel running on both, but if it doesn't have an XP driver you will need a different one anyway

some really epic underclocks going on, it seems like K10 is even a lot better than k8 for this stuff, when I went from A64 to Core 2 (and now running an i5 sandy bridge) I always missed the flexibility I had with the AMD CPU with clock and voltage control on windows
the lowest my k8 would go was 600MHz (4x 150) with my motherboard.

Reply 48 of 121, by y2k se

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SPBHM wrote:

I think triple screen gaming is not supported by the XP drivers for AMD at least, not sure about Nvidia, so it's just a question of disabling the extra monitors?

I have a GTX 980 video card. There are no XP drivers. Not to mention the trouble a video card with 4 GB of VRAM is going to cause in a 32-bit XP install.

as for controllers what do you mean? I have the same gamepad and wheel running on both

I have a Fanatec setup. Clubsport v2 Wheel Base connected by USB with a SQ Shifter connected to the wheel base. Clubsport pedals are connected directly to the computer by USB because it gives greater resolution than connecting directly to the wheel. Some of the XP games don't support multiple controllers. Others don't make good enough use of the force feedback to be drivable.

but if it doesn't have an XP driver you will need a different one anyway

I will be using one of my backup wheels.

This is the current setup. Mid 2016 I will probably upgrade to a proper racing rig and repurpose this for the XP system I'll build.

Obykkm8l.jpg

Tualatin Celeron 1.4 + Powerleap PL-IP3/T, ASUS P2B, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 4 Ti 4200, Voodoo2 SLI, AWE64, 32GB IDE SSD, Dell 2001FP

Reply 49 of 121, by clueless1

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Snayperskaya wrote:
Um, PCI-X slots don't have the lanes concept since all slots share the same bus. Isn't it a PCI-e slot? […]
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clueless1 wrote:

The PCI-X slot will only run at x4.

Um, PCI-X slots don't have the lanes concept since all slots share the same bus. Isn't it a PCI-e slot?

pci-slots.jpg

Yeah, thanks for catching that. I borked the acronym and meant PCI-e of course. Living up to my name!
http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/4CoreDual-VSTA/

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 50 of 121, by SPBHM

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right, for some reason I thought Nvidia had clearly released an XP driver but

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/7833 … s-xp-drivers/3/

according to this thread people have working drivers for the GTX 980 for XP and there are no memory problems, but if you want official support a 780 would be better.

Reply 52 of 121, by DX7_EP

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From what I have checked, Catalyst 14.4 seems to be the latest drivers for AMD GPUs, complete with support for the lower-end R7 and R9 cards as well as the 7xxx series.
NVIDIA seems to also suggest that even the GTX 950 and 960 work with XP. 😕

I've been taking a look at this thread and the overall topic of XP builds lately as well. Quite interesting stuff, and it could lead to a re-use of a few C2Ds and DDR2 DIMMs I have around.

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Reply 53 of 121, by PhilsComputerLab

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Yea, lower end C2D are cheap as chips. I was in charge of "recycling" quite a few machines at work. Anyone want a free E4500? 🤣 The higher end gear, Wolfdale and C2Q still commands a nice premium. Same goes for gaming / enthusiast boards. But they will always hold value.

Still, a second hand H61 board with a Pentium does not cost that much more, so we will see how socket 775 retro machines go in the next few years. While there are more machines, there are also more potential retro gamers (a new generation).

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Reply 54 of 121, by sgt76

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Just a question that I'm curious to hear about. Do any of you use Athlon 64 setups for your XP gaming rig? Or is there no point since Core 2 and faster systems are available for so cheap these days?

Reply 55 of 121, by Tetrium

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sgt76 wrote:

Just a question that I'm curious to hear about. Do any of you use Athlon 64 setups for your XP gaming rig? Or is there no point since Core 2 and faster systems are available for so cheap these days?

I've used Athlon 64 setups extensively in the past, multiple machines for years, and I think it's an excellent solution! 😀

One thing is that when I used them, Core 2 and faster was still much more expensive. A good sweet spot.

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Reply 56 of 121, by PhilsComputerLab

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sgt76 wrote:

Just a question that I'm curious to hear about. Do any of you use Athlon 64 setups for your XP gaming rig? Or is there no point since Core 2 and faster systems are available for so cheap these days?

I've built one for a YT video project a while ago: Building an AMD Athlon 64 Retro Gaming PC Windows XP

I used a 7900 GTX and a S754 Athlon 64 setup.

The machine worked great, it's a better choice compared to building a Socket A machine.

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Reply 57 of 121, by sgt76

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I guess I missed that episode Phil. I saw the other one where you recommended Quadro cards for Win98 rigs- great advice which I followed also.

I have a Core 2 rig which I'm slowly rebuilding back to its former glory. I also love Athlon 64 systems but I'm trying to justify to myself whether it's worth the cost and effort to build such a system. Or will it be redundant? 😕

A lot of folks here seem to recommend the GTX285. I used an 8800GT back in the day or it there something better out there for this sort of thing?

Oh yes, and Merry Christmas!

Reply 58 of 121, by Arctic

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I guess this would be my "High End Windows XP System"

AMD Athlon X2 4400+ @ 2.3GHz
2048MB DDR2 800 A-Data Vitesta Extreme Edition
Asus M2N68-AM Plus
Geforce 7800GTX 256MB
200GB SATA
Onboard Gigabit LAN
BFG Ageia PhysX 128MB PCI (card stalls the whole PC when it's booting its driver)
Windows XP

Reply 59 of 121, by PhilsComputerLab

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sgt76 wrote:

A lot of folks here seem to recommend the GTX285. I used an 8800GT back in the day or it there something better out there for this sort of thing?

Oh yes, and Merry Christmas!

I will have to do a lot more tests to find "my" recommended XP GPU. Especially if you want to use some AA and things like that. There are a LOT of cards that work with XP, one issue is the drivers. You can go with a 500 series for example, but then the earliest XP driver is from 2010. Whereas a 8800GT has drivers from late 2007.

I'd also like to check out AMD as an option.

Resolution / monitor plays a big role. Full HD can be a bit of challenge for older cards, whereas 1280 x 1024 works quite well. And that resolution is basically supported by every XP game, whereas Full HD is hit and miss depending on the game and involves tweaking.

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