Robin4 does make a good point. I would also just go with a PCIe. Lots more options and graphics cards are cheap 😀

After having used 3 AM3 rigs (admittedly with 7) I have to say that I like the AM3 platform a lot!
If it works for a top XP rig then I've made my mind up already 😁 and of course it helps that I already have the parts available instead of having to get older Intel parts which has 1337 different sockets and even more CPUs with all kinds of different names that don't make any sense at all 🤣!

KT7AGuy wrote:

... the hipsters we've been bashing ...

I take back what I said about hipsters and their man-buns. My memories of the 70s and 80s are tinted by some seriously rose-colored glasses.

(Off-topic, I know)

All the talk on what made an ideal XP system made me think about what parts I'd use for an XP build.

My current P4EE 3.2 GHz/2 GB DDR-400/6800 Ultra build should handle most of the stuff that won't run on Vista or later quite right, things like missing music and ambient sound in BF: Vietnam, for instance. If it doesn't quite cut it, I still kept around an Athlon 64 3700+ machine that just needed a hand-me-down 8800 GT from my Q6600 box, maybe a bit more RAM as well (1 GB DDR-400, but I'm not gimping my P4 box by swapping out its better RAM).

Sure, I could opt for post-Core 2 era hardware and DX11 GPUs, but I don't see the point when that hardware is just yearning for 64-bit Windows 7 to unleash its full potential. I'd feel like I'm gimping it all, and any game that would demand that kind of hardware runs flawlessly on Vista onward anyway, and by extension, my much more modern i7-4770K/GTX 980 setup.

Now that I think about it, if I want to perfect my 98/XP P4EE box for the XP side of things, I need to hunt down one of those old Ageia PhysX PPU cards. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 doesn't support NVIDIA GPU-accelerated PhysX; it's too old. (But if someone knows of a workaround, it'll save me one more niche part to try and collect!)

NamelessPlayer:

I too was thinking of picking up a real PhysX card for my Win7 system that uses a Radeon. I haven't looked into it much because I'm not quite sure it will be worth the time, money and effort. If you manage to get one and make it work, please do post about it so that others (such as myself) can learn from your experience.

KT7AGuy wrote:

NamelessPlayer:

I too was thinking of picking up a real PhysX card for my Win7 system that uses a Radeon. I haven't looked into it much because I'm not quite sure it will be worth the time, money and effort. If you manage to get one and make it work, please do post about it so that others (such as myself) can learn from your experience.

Win7's newer than I had in mind for this since any future PPU purchases are going in my XP box, and if you're planning what I'm thinking, then you're just going to end up in a world of hurt and DLL hell even for CPU-only PhysX SDK 2.x titles. It's not even supported on PhysX SDK 3.x, which was a big codebase cleanup and meant for NVIDIA GPUs.

I might just snag a card soon, though. They're pretty cheap right now. The real question is where I'm going to find all the software that was developed with it in mind, mainly all the CellFactor and Bet On Soldier stuff.

Anyway, I had another realization that plays into this thread topic: with NVIDIA finally dropping VGA output through DVI-I on their new Pascal cards, much to the consternation of GDM-FW900 owners and CRT enthusiasts everywhere, this is going to wind up with Titan X and maybe 980 Ti cards holding surprisingly high values down the road simply due to their "most powerful cards to still have an integrated RAMDAC that doesn't suck" status. I'm gonna have to eye those cards closely as the years pass, even if they're not that much of an upgrade from my GTX 980.

It also raises the question of when we'll start seeing decent DisplayPort-to-VGA adapters that can drive a high-end CRT as well as, if not better than, an integrated RAMDAC. They'd probably be HDFury levels of hideously expensive, though.