Just an FYI, the AMD iCafe unified driver supports upto R7 370 offially on XP and probably also Hawaii and Fiji GPUs (probably not nano) are supposed to work with an inf mod. The iCafe drivers AMD distributed for internet cafes in China... the installer you want is icafe-winxp-9.00.300.3010-beta1-br294594-sep24.exe

AMD doesn't have a link for it anymore but you can find it online if you look hard enough.

cb88 wrote:

Just an FYI, the AMD iCafe unified driver supports upto R7 370 offially on XP and probably also Hawaii and Fiji GPUs (probably not nano) are supposed to work with an inf mod. The iCafe drivers AMD distributed for internet cafes in China... the installer you want is icafe-winxp-9.00.300.3010-beta1-br294594-sep24.exe

AMD doesn't have a link for it anymore but you can find it online if you look hard enough.

I've downloaded this driver (not the easiest thing to find, but I got it with bit torrent) and quickly glanced at the inf
the newest things I see are 370 and 360
the problem is that these cards are rebrands of already supported ones
the 360 is based on the GPU of the 260, which is also the HD 7790,
the 370 is the 265 and 7850

I didn't see anything newer, I don't think it adds support to any actual different GPU from the official drivers, just some different cards basically

I was playing around with XP on my HTPC (i5-4670K @ 4.4) a couple weeks ago. I had to dig out my old GTX-680 for proper XP support.

Haswell pumps out some insane frame rates running XP games. That silly fast L1 cache is apparently good for more than just keeping the SIMD units stoked in AVX2 mode!

SPBHM wrote:

I've downloaded this driver (not the easiest thing to find, but I got it with bit torrent) and quickly glanced at the inf the ne […]
Show full quote

cb88 wrote:

Just an FYI, the AMD iCafe unified driver supports upto R7 370 offially on XP and probably also Hawaii and Fiji GPUs (probably not nano) are supposed to work with an inf mod. The iCafe drivers AMD distributed for internet cafes in China... the installer you want is icafe-winxp-9.00.300.3010-beta1-br294594-sep24.exe

AMD doesn't have a link for it anymore but you can find it online if you look hard enough.

I've downloaded this driver (not the easiest thing to find, but I got it with bit torrent) and quickly glanced at the inf
the newest things I see are 370 and 360
the problem is that these cards are rebrands of already supported ones
the 360 is based on the GPU of the 260, which is also the HD 7790,
the 370 is the 265 and 7850

I didn't see anything newer, I don't think it adds support to any actual different GPU from the official drivers, just some different cards basically

You're missing the point you can inf mod this driver to support newer GPUs.

cb88 wrote:

SPBHM wrote:

I've downloaded this driver (not the easiest thing to find, but I got it with bit torrent) and quickly glanced at the inf the ne […]
Show full quote

cb88 wrote:

Just an FYI, the AMD iCafe unified driver supports upto R7 370 offially on XP and probably also Hawaii and Fiji GPUs (probably not nano) are supposed to work with an inf mod. The iCafe drivers AMD distributed for internet cafes in China... the installer you want is icafe-winxp-9.00.300.3010-beta1-br294594-sep24.exe

AMD doesn't have a link for it anymore but you can find it online if you look hard enough.

I've downloaded this driver (not the easiest thing to find, but I got it with bit torrent) and quickly glanced at the inf
the newest things I see are 370 and 360
the problem is that these cards are rebrands of already supported ones
the 360 is based on the GPU of the 260, which is also the HD 7790,
the 370 is the 265 and 7850

I didn't see anything newer, I don't think it adds support to any actual different GPU from the official drivers, just some different cards basically

You're missing the point you can inf mod this driver to support newer GPUs.

inf modding is basically taking advantage of different cards based on the same GPU/architecture, like modding the official bios to use a r7 370(7850 rebrand/OC),
it wont create support for a different GPU like Fiji which doesn't have anything related supported already

buckeye wrote:

Azarien wrote:

I'm using Radeon HD7850 on my XP machine. I believe the last Radeon with XP support is HD7870, but I chose 7850 because it was significantly cheaper and not that much slower in benchmarks.

How far back does the game compatibility go with that card?

I'm not sure how to answer this question because most of the old stuff I play is through DOSBox or it comes from Steam or GOG and is pre-patched and tested for modern systems anyway.
The main reason I upgraded from HD5770 to HD7850 few years ago was to get better framerate in Tomb Raider (2013) so legacy compatibility wasn't my main concern.
That said, Need for Speed 4 (1999) works, but Jedi Knight (1997) was very problematic.
Early Tomb Raiders 2/3/4 work.

The fastest AMD video card that has XP drivers would be the HD7990. For Quadfire, you can use 2 of them.

Still not going to be as fast as the fastest nVidia setup that supports XP though.

Still going to be way faster than you would ever need for games that workj on XP better than 7/8/10 though.

And no, you don't have to have an nVidia chipset for SLI.. at least not unless you are running an older board.

Most of the newer boards (Core-i series) (1366, 2011, 2011 v3, etc.) will do CFX and SLI. Not sure about the regular lower pin count CPU boards as I never had a system with one. But you are limited by a lower number of PCIE lanes on those boards anyway.

And if you want a really fun setup, you can set up a hybrid setup where you use an AMD card for your main card and an nVidia card for PhysX.

Another fun thing to do with a hybrid setup is start up a game in windowed mode and then drag it from the monitor that is hooked up to one card to the monitor that is hooked up to the other card. I only did this in Windows 7.. never tried it in XP. Not 100% sure if the XP drivers from before nVidia locked out being able to do hybrid setups will work in XP.

Is there a way to limit the amount of RAM in Windows XP the way you can in 98? For instance, I have been able to first install 512MB of RAM in a system, set a limit within the OS and then install a max of 2GB for another OS on a dual-boot. Can I do this in XP? I'd like to try to install XP32 on my current rig (4820K Ivy-E) but I have 64GB of RAM in this system which I'm sure XP won't like.

infiniteclouds wrote:

Is there a way to limit the amount of RAM in Windows XP the way you can in 98? For instance, I have been able to first install 512MB of RAM in a system, set a limit within the OS and then install a max of 2GB for another OS on a dual-boot. Can I do this in XP? I'd like to try to install XP32 on my current rig (4820K Ivy-E) but I have 64GB of RAM in this system which I'm sure XP won't like.

XP doesn't care how much ram you have.

cyclone3d wrote:

The fastest AMD video card that has XP drivers would be the HD7990. For Quadfire, you can use 2 of them. […]
Show full quote

The fastest AMD video card that has XP drivers would be the HD7990. For Quadfire, you can use 2 of them.

Still not going to be as fast as the fastest nVidia setup that supports XP though.

Still going to be way faster than you would ever need for games that workj on XP better than 7/8/10 though.

And no, you don't have to have an nVidia chipset for SLI.. at least not unless you are running an older board.

Most of the newer boards (Core-i series) (1366, 2011, 2011 v3, etc.) will do CFX and SLI. Not sure about the regular lower pin count CPU boards as I never had a system with one. But you are limited by a lower number of PCIE lanes on those boards anyway.

And if you want a really fun setup, you can set up a hybrid setup where you use an AMD card for your main card and an nVidia card for PhysX.

Another fun thing to do with a hybrid setup is start up a game in windowed mode and then drag it from the monitor that is hooked up to one card to the monitor that is hooked up to the other card. I only did this in Windows 7.. never tried it in XP. Not 100% sure if the XP drivers from before nVidia locked out being able to do hybrid setups will work in XP.

XP doesn't support multiple display drivers

mothergoose729 wrote:

XP doesn't support multiple display drivers

Maybe not if they are from the same mfg (different versions of drivers from the same GPU mfg will not work together), but from what I am finding, people back in the XP days were indeed running two different brands of video cards in XP at the same time.

I'm definitely going to have to test it out for myself.

I got a gtx980 and 2 gtx570s and a 1155 board (gigabyte UD z77) with an i5 2500k laying around. I'm thinking of making an XP rig, would the 2500k and the gtx980 be good for this? I know the 980 is overkill but I don't mind maxing out AA/AF on my games. i'd be playing anything from '05 to '09, would one of the gtx570s be more suitable?

cyclone3d wrote:

Maybe not if they are from the same mfg (different versions of drivers from the same GPU mfg will not work together), but from what I am finding, people back in the XP days were indeed running two different brands of video cards in XP at the same time.

I remember having Radeon HD3850 (or similar) on PCI Express and Riva TNT on standard PCI.
Don't ask why 😀

"What would be the fastest XP Setup with XP Era Hardware?"

Well... first we probably need to define what you mean by "XP Era". Where does your XP Era end? Does it end when the "Vista Era" begins? Does it end when Microsoft stopped supporting it (Well into the Windows 8 Era)?

Windows XP Release - October 25, 2001
The fastest CPUs were the Intel Pentium 4 "Willamette" 1-core @2.0 GHz and the AMD Athlon XP 1800+ "Palomino" 1-core @1.53GHz.
The fastest graphics cards were the NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500 and the ATI Radeon 8500.

Windows Vista Release - January 30, 2007
The fastest CPUs were the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 "Conroe" 2-core @2.93 GHz and the AMD Athlon X2 64 6000+ "Brisbane" 2-core @3.1GHz .
The fastest graphics cards were the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX and the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX.

End Windows XP Mainstream Support - April 14, 2009
The fastest CPUs were the Intel Core i7 Extreme 965 "Bloomfield" 4(8) cores(threads) @3.2GHz and the AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition 4-core @3.0GHz.
The fastest graphics cards were the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 and the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2.

Windows 7 Released - October 22, 2009
Windows 8 Released - October 26, 2012
Windows 8.1 Released - October 17, 2013

End Windows XP Extended Support - April 8, 2014
The fastest CPUs were the Intel Core i7-4771 "Haswell" 4(8) cores(threads) @3.5GHz and the AMD FX-9590 8-core @4.7GHz.
The fastest graphics cards were the NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Z and the AMD Radeon R9 290X.

There you go.

Brisbane Athlon X2 64 6000+ should have been released in june 2008, whats more its a lower end model with halved cache, for jan 2007 the best amd would still be the Windsor Athlon 64 FX-62 at 2.8.

For your end of support data, i7-4771, really? Don't you mean i7-4770K, its a few months older but it has same specs + unlocked multiplier. But to begin with thats the mainstream platform, I'd put the HEDT ivy bridge i7-4960X 6-core cpu, or if we include server cpus as they also work on desktop motherboards, the 8-core Xeon E5-1680V2. With release date of september 2013 they fit right in, and while the ipc is ever so slightly lower than haswell, the higher core count, better overclockability and especially the performance bonus of quad channel ddr3 should make it the best for that moment in time, and incidentaly they are also the best that havd winXP drivers for the motherboard. In fact the Xeon E5-1680V2 is capable of outperforming a Ryzen 2700X 😀 Also R9 290X doesnt have winXP drivers, so it would be R9 280X here.

It is possible to install XP on a Z370 board (and probably Z390 or H77 too) but it requires modifying the image to slipstream intel ACHI drivers.

Socket 1155 and I believe LGA 2011V-3 are the most advance sockets to reliably support XP.

mothergoose729 wrote:

It is possible to install XP on a Z370 board (and probably Z390 or H77 too) but it requires modifying the image to slipstream intel ACHI drivers.

Socket 1155 and I believe LGA 2011V-3 are the most advance sockets to reliably support XP.

Have you done this? Which driver? I'm naturally skeptical. Z370 is supposed to be the last Intel chipset to support Windows 7, hadn't even considered XP would work. Is this with a USB card or in some compatibility mode?

https://www.win-raid.com/t4093f45-Guide-How-t … offee-Lake.html

mothergoose729 wrote:

https://www.win-raid.com/t4093f45-Guide-How-t … offee-Lake.html

Thanks. I suspect it's more trouble than it's worth but you can at least get an installation on there. I'd be interested to see how the ACPI / IRQ issues affect performance, stability and everyday use. Lack of any power management or USB is a hard pass for me though.

BushLin wrote:

mothergoose729 wrote:

https://www.win-raid.com/t4093f45-Guide-How-t … offee-Lake.html

Thanks. I suspect it's more trouble than it's worth but you can at least get an installation on there. I'd be interested to see how the ACPI / IRQ issues affect performance, stability and everyday use. Lack of any power management or USB is a hard pass for me though.

My experience with unsupported USB controllers is that they default to 1.1 or 2.0 speeds, but still function.

Look, because I come from the single-core Windows XP crowd, I'd be supremely happy with a Pentium Dual-Core running around 3GHz for a Windows XP gaming rig. I think it would fit right in with that era's games, as long as the graphics card was up to snuff. I ran my XP laptop for 6 years without real issues on a single-core with no hyper-threading. Even my 2010 gaming rig's i7-860 ran at 2.8GHz for years with Windows 7. Core 2 Duo was "Windows Vista" territory to me, because I never stepped into the multi-Core arena until I was building a Vista system. I didn't hit 4GHz until I got my Skylake i7-6700K in 2015. I never did game on Vista, though. I built an every-day system and in that, I completely succeeded.

Hmmmm. Maybe I'll actually re-built a Vista gaming rig appropriate for the 2008/9 year. I did find my original Vista install disk, but it's Home Premium 32-bit. Anyone here have a 64-bit image? I'm sure the activation code doesn't care if it's 32- or 64-bit.