Yup, great chip. There are so many choices on AM3 socket 😀

That's the great thing about AMD. Really, for up to 2006 games I think a dual core is all you need. Now cores can be disabled in the BIOS for lowering power consumption or improving compatibility.

Also AMD has a driver / tool along the lines of dual core optimizer or something like that. It solves some gaming issues I believe.

shamino wrote:

If you care much about decent web browsing performance or watching videos with this machine, then I recommend you go with Athlon64 as a minimum. The socket-A AthlonXP CPUs don't support SSE2. It didn't matter much back then, but it's become crippling with newer software, web browsing, and video playback.

I wonder if it's the massive reduction in memory latency you get with K8 that makes web browsing more tolerable. The L2 cache is also 128-bit wide on K8 (64-bit on K7).

SSE2 probably helps with video, but I have big doubts about it helping generally. K8's SSE2 performance also isn't exactly mind blowing. It's better than Pentium M's though...

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Also AMD has a driver / tool along the lines of dual core optimizer or something like that. It solves some gaming issues I believe.

Dual Core Optimizer is apparently actually a bug fix to synchronize time stamp counters between the cores. It helps with some programs that rely on that counter. Definitely a good idea to have it installed.

There's a quirk to Phenom and its K10 friends on XP. You need to either disable Cool'n'Quiet or use a utility that can lock all the cores to the same speed. Otherwise K10's fancy independent core clocks combined with XP's scheduler cause threads to jump to ~800 MHz cores unexpectedly and it has significant speed implications. Phenom II locks the clocks together on NT6 but XP is still affected.

I used to use PhenomMSRTweaker to fix this problem. I think you need to use the custom Cool'n'Quiet function instead of letting the BIOS implement CnQ.

First we have to know game's period you want to play.
If i were you, i would use Athlon 462 platform only for late win98's games to prevent performance issue.
Anyway the main problem: all 462 CPUs doesn't have SSE2 instructions and this is a big problem especially if you run them with ATI-AMD Radeon GPU that suffer of a big bug.
All Catalyst 6-7-8 and up from radeon RV300 to RV670 aka radeon HD3850 suffer of blue screen of Death because driver is trying to use some SSE2 functions in cases. And there is problem, because no one AMD procesor for Socket A have support for SSE2 functions. So in this case, system crash.
Some example F.E.A.R, half-life 2 etc
I suffered myself about this problem, there are a lot of thread that describe this situation, i don't have enough free time so i now use 939 platform instead.

I would also like to say, that Phenom II is really not period correct if you're into XP games. Hell, I still use Phenom II 805 on a daily basis with Win10 and I can play most recent games with med-high settings! The AMD 64 (X2) would be my choice too with GeForce 6 or 7-series GPU.

sf78 wrote:

I would also like to say, that Phenom II is really not period correct if you're into XP games. Hell, I still use Phenom II 805 on a daily basis with Win10 and I can play most recent games with med-high settings! The AMD 64 (X2) would be my choice too with GeForce 6 or 7-series GPU.

There are three camps when it comes to this, some people want period correct setups while others just build something newer that works and the last bunch who are just gunning for pure speed. Phenom 2 is great as there is a lot less annoying bottnecking and you get a great platform unlike with some core 2 builds or older. For those who just feel like it a first gen i5 setup with a good board makes for an amazing XP "rocket", i5 6x0 dual core with HT disabled and a aggressive overclock what more can one ask for.

nforce4max wrote:

There are three camps when it comes to this, some people want period correct setups while others just build something newer that works and the last bunch who are just gunning for pure speed. Phenom 2 is great as there is a lot less annoying bottnecking and you get a great platform unlike with some core 2 builds or older. For those who just feel like it a first gen i5 setup with a good board makes for an amazing XP "rocket", i5 6x0 dual core with HT disabled and a aggressive overclock what more can one ask for.

You forgot those who just want something that runs vintage software properly.

i dont understand why would you need specific hardware for XP, XP Runs on alot of motherboard and video cards

gdjacobs wrote:

nforce4max wrote:

There are three camps when it comes to this, some people want period correct setups while others just build something newer that works and the last bunch who are just gunning for pure speed. Phenom 2 is great as there is a lot less annoying bottnecking and you get a great platform unlike with some core 2 builds or older. For those who just feel like it a first gen i5 setup with a good board makes for an amazing XP "rocket", i5 6x0 dual core with HT disabled and a aggressive overclock what more can one ask for.

You forgot those who just want something that runs vintage software properly.

There is so much out there that can run xp that everyone has the freedom to basically do what ever they want and XP supports everything up to Ivy Bridge.

sf78 wrote:

I would also like to say, that Phenom II is really not period correct if you're into XP games. Hell, I still use Phenom II 805 on a daily basis with Win10 and I can play most recent games with med-high settings! The AMD 64 (X2) would be my choice too with GeForce 6 or 7-series GPU.

I admit I'm not normal, but the funny thing is that most of my time using WinXP has been on the Phenom2, so I associate it more strongly with XP than most people would. For most of the time that I had a 32-bit Athlon I was still using Win2k. My XP was one of the last retail copies I could still find, and I think it was about a year later that I upgraded to the Phenom2 hardware that I'm still using. It wasn't until just recently that new games stopped running on XP, so depending how you look at it, a wide range of hardware can be seen as correct for it.

The XP era is so interesting because everyone sees it differently and you can indeed use so many different parts. We will see all sorts of XP machines and I think that's awesome 😁

I haven't chosen sides yet, and I might never will because it really doesn't matter much which way you go.

But I'm definitely leaning towards newer gear / time machine gaming rather than building a period correct machine. Similar to my views on building a Super Socket 7 beast rather than a retro 386.

My XP machine happens to be mostly period correct for late 2006/early 2007, but I didn't plan it that way--those were the components I just happened to be able to get a hold of cheaply. Just tried F.E.A.R. last night (a 2005 release) and sure enough, it runs with a minumum framerate of >40 FPS with everything maxed out (my monitor goes to 1280x1024). And that is the newest commercial game I have on this machine. It's main purpose is GOG games. The only more modern game I have is Xonotic, and it runs great on the machine too.

And F.E.A.R. is really an extremely demanding game. Just disable the soft shadows, that alone will give it a huge boost.