as far as I know even Haswell works well with XP (but the drivers are "beta")
not sure about Haswell-e or Skylake, but I guess a 4790K with OC would be "the fastest" for XP gaming.
for the graphics card, I think the current cards (like even a GTX 980) still have updated drivers.

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

if it's just for XP, I think you would only use it for games from 2007 and older? anything newer should run well/better on Vista+
so if you take hardware from that time you should be fine, like e8400+8800GT...

I have an H61 (SandyBridge) board running XP quite fine, even with AHCI, I've actually installed it originally using legacy ide, but later converted it to AHCI, I got the drivers from the Intel website, just updated the right thing on device manager with the AHCI driver, rebooted changing the bios to AHCI and it worked, the only problem was figuring out which one was the right driver, and it was the one called "workstation\server" something.

That's good to know!

Agreed, for a pure XP machine, a cheap Sandy Bridge uATX board and a Pentium does the job. 2007 is spot on. That's when many games started supporting DX10 and GPU demands exploded.

one thing that I forgot and I think I should mention is that my H61 Sandy Bridge board is running with a bios from November 2010, I know there are a lot of changes with the newer bios with ivy bridge support, maybe they affect compatibility with XP?

y2k se wrote:

I have a few racing games that were released for Windows XP. I could run them reasonably well on my modern PC (the i5-3570K in my signature) but they don't work so well with recent upgrades. So, I want to build a dedicated machine for these XP games. My research shows an LGA775 P45 chipset motherboard, Core 2 Duo E8600 CPU and GTX 285 video card is the fastest hardware for single-threaded processes that natively supports Windows XP. Can anyone confirm or correct?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_X … microprocessors

xeon core 2s are the fastest, harpertown, but such a system build cost works out to about the same as a faster Westmere-EP 1366 xeon build based on ebay pricing, so if I already had a 775 system I'd be looking at upgrading but for a fresh build I'd go 1366 which come in four or six cores which run games up to present day nearly as well as the latest cpus. As well, my preference is for low power so I'd be looking at getting the low power version with the highest multiplier and overclocking.

There are many ways to get "enough" performance for a "late XP system".

A good choice is Socket-1155 with an I7 2600K/2700K/3770K with a GTX580 or a GTX750ti if you want a low power build.

I prefer using Socket-775 with an overclocked EXXX0 or QXXX0, when it comes to video cards I think the GTX285 is the sweet spot.

Socket-1366 is also very nice but unless going for a second generation 4-core CPU (like the Xeon E5620) it will use quite alot of power.

If you want "the best" performance a 2600K/2700K @5000+ MHz with GTX580 or better video card is probably the way to go. So far here at Vogons the system with the best Doom 3 score is my Sandybridge 2600K @5.2 with a single GTX580. My system is air-cooled so it isnt stable at 5.2 but it is stable at 5.0 and I think you would need to get an I7 3770K up to 4.8 GHz to get the same performace which in my experience isnt easy. I see no good reason to go after that kind of performace if the goal isnt to get some really good scores in some more or less pointless benchmarks.

Yes such a machine is oozing performance in abundance. The more demanding DX9 games with some issues under XP that I'm aware of are Far Cry and F.E.A.R. A GTX 285 is a great card for these games. I'd still like to investigate AA, maybe super sampling AA and how that impacts performance at 1600 x 1200 / Full HD. I've got a GTX 285 and 275 in my arsenal. And another GTX 285 incoming for some SLI retro action 😀

A while ago I tried a GTX 660 with XP and it was wonderful. 750 Ti is not far behind, but draws less power. Either way I'm excited that XP gaming is being discusses more and more. An exciting time...

To me the XP era ends with EAX that is main reason to build a XP machine. There is one compatibility problem I have run into with very fast XP machines and that is with GTA SA there will be shading errors it seems the faster the system the worse it gets and physics errors can occur on some systems. If you research this it will say it because of the frame limiter being turned off well turning it on helps the problems but did not get rid of them, I am not sure what hardware is the factor in causing these problems but I have found the errors seem to be little to none on a fast AGP system. If anyone is wondering how to run GTA SA at 60FPS turn the frame limiter off in the game menu and force Vsync on in the driver control panel

CPU speed isn't an issue. On an AMD system I played around once I was able to lower the multiplier and have it run at 800 MHz 😁

That was a Phenom II X2 555.

the GTA SA PC port was a little strange, for this game it's probably worth to download some community made fixes/mods

frame limiter on, for no good reason limits the game to 25 FPS, even the PS2 version would run at 30FPS (well, the NTSC version at least)
also the physics seems to change with the framerate, so it's probably best to limit the game to 30;
basically I think you need this patch to run the game decently
http://www.gtagarage.com/mods/show.php?id=25368

but yes, regarding CPU speed, it's not difficult, I remember having to downclock my athlon 64 to 1GHz or less (all via software on XP, just changing the multiplier down) for "need for speed porsche 2000" to work properly, over 1Ghz it would run with a reduced quality mode, similar to when I played it with a Voodoo 2 8mb I think.

the AMD CPUs tend to be better for this, controlling clock/voltage on windows

Under the Xmas tree?

🤣

SPBHM wrote:

the AMD CPUs tend to be better for this, controlling clock/voltage on windows

I don't where you get this idea, back to core 2 can soft change the multiplier to get 800mhz -1GHz.

awgamer wrote:

SPBHM wrote:

the AMD CPUs tend to be better for this, controlling clock/voltage on windows

I don't where you get this idea, back to core 2 can soft change the multiplier to get 800mhz -1GHz.

the ones that I have only go as low as 6x multiplier with a 200 or more FSB (so it would require me to lower the fsb on the bios), also softwares never gave me enough options to deal with the voltage like I used to on the Athlon 64 with crystal cpuid, I would easily with a few clicks go down to 4x multiplier and 0.8v or whatever I wanted, and I could set those clocks to act like Cool n quiet (which would only by default go as low as 6x and 1.10v on that CPU I think), with Intel 775 I tried RMCLOCK and Throttle stop and didn't achieve the same kind of thing, it was a lot more motherboard dependent and/or limited to the speedstep range

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.

philscomputerlab wrote:

CPU speed isn't an issue. On an AMD system I played around once I was able to lower the multiplier and have it run at 800 MHz 😁

That was a Phenom II X2 555.

Indeed. 🤣

How does it get a .75 multiplier? Also, have you ever checked to find the lowest fsb?

My last daily-use experience with XP was back in mid-2012, when I had the following rig:

Core 2 Quad Q9400 (OC'd to 3.4GHz) under a Thermax Eclipse II
Asus P5Q motherboard
2x2 GB 800MHz (4-4-4-12) G.Skill PI Black
MSI GTX 570 (had a Sapphire 4870 1GB before)

Had a minor trouble on the first year of this machine - My RAM wouldn't be stable on dual channel with default settings. I just had to give it +0.2V and +0.1V to the SB chip and I had no further problems.

It ran everything I threw at it pretty well. It's amazing how XP can "bend" its performance metrics to not suck completely on older CPUs (PII/K6-2) and can deliver nice performance on high-end hardware. Went for W7 SP1 when I grabbed my 2600K in July on that same year since I wanted to use 16GB RAM. It was also my first time on overclocking (stabilizing 775 is dependent on lots of stuff so it was hard at the beggining but the experience paid off).

That's impressive TELVM 😀

awgamer wrote:

How does it get a .75 multiplier?

There is this little wonder called K10stat that allows you absolute control on Phenom II, Athlon II and Llano CPUs. 😎

awgamer wrote:

... have you ever checked to find the lowest fsb?

Nope, in fact I use K10stat mainly for CPU overclocking. I set FSB in BIOS.

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.

On this particular mobo (ASUS M4A89GTD-Pro) the manual says that CPU Bus Frequency range is 100~600. Guess that at 0.5 x 100 the CPU should tick @ 50Mhz, but I've never tried something of this sort. 🤣

Just to clarify: K10stat can't control FSB freq, just CPU multiplier, CPU voltage and NB voltage.