Why in the world would you ever install a liquid cooling system in there? It would be an absolute waste of time. Core 2 Duos run very cool anyways, and I don't get why you'd try upgrading one that much to begin with since most games of the era run fine on modern hardware.

brian105 wrote on 2020-05-04, 16:52:

Why in the world would you ever install a liquid cooling system in there? It would be an absolute waste of time. Core 2 Duos run very cool anyways, and I don't get why you'd try upgrading one that much to begin with since most games of the era run fine on modern hardware.

Because this is the most modern hardware I've got beside an Atom mini-itx. 😀
The idea was to build this config with the P4 661 being the "best" P4 and it'd still run well but then I was thinking about using cheap old components for a faster still capable machine, overclock the E8600 to 3,66Ghz, SSD, ram maybe a GPU like a GTX4xx/5xx something like that and I imagine I'd have a sort of HD 720p resolution oriented "modern" still capable machine.
And then I have this CoolerMaster basic liquid system I tried once and never used anymore.

I see no use in that much effort. The E8600 gets obliterated by 2nd gen i3's. Honestly, I'd save up some money for a used desktop on eBay such as the Optiplex 9010 or 9020. Will ship with a CPU miles better than the E8600. I know your feeling of being attached to a machine from that time, it still seems capable (I have a spare overclocked E7200 and GT 630), but gaming is absolutely a no-go.

I've a similar set up but with an Ati Radeon HD4870. It makes for a fantastic XP gamer. Strangely, I too have a liquid cooler on the CPU. A corsair AIO, H60 or something like that, I forget.
A 120GB SSD for the OS and a couple of spinners for games.
Get a better graphics card, maybe an Audigy 2 ZS or a X-Fi for Eax and you're good to go.

I tested a PCIe x1 variant of this GPU with 512 MB GDDR3 a while ago. The test system was a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 HT 660 with 2 GB DDR2-533 RAM running Windows 7 Pro 32-bit:

3DMark2001: 13238
3DMark2003: 8463
3DMark2005: 4803
3DMark2006: 2694

ETA: correction

brian105 wrote on 2020-05-05, 04:21:

I see no use in that much effort. The E8600 gets obliterated by 2nd gen i3's. Honestly, I'd save up some money for a used desktop on eBay such as the Optiplex 9010 or 9020. Will ship with a CPU miles better than the E8600. I know your feeling of being attached to a machine from that time, it still seems capable (I have a spare overclocked E7200 and GT 630), but gaming is absolutely a no-go.

Yeah I imagine it's not worth the money I'd spend on a GPU that would not be stressed by the cpu at all. I've never been a fan of these Intel generations cpu until I tested it and sure were impressing and somehow still nowdays. There're many youtube test videos where they question the usability in the last years with acceptables results. Going to say also these mainboards were really well built and without those awful modern UEFI bios.
But still maybe it's time to upgrade as soon as I could in future. Lately I found an FM2 mainboard I was thinking faster but the fastest processor supported seems just a bit faster than the E8600 and it didn't even boot (no components seems faulty, I may try to change the eeprom directly to see if the bios got damaged somehow but still an old solution not worth at all).
I am not expert of modern config, imagine I always considered these 775 config fastest things ever tried. 😁
And I'm used to the mighty Atom Cedarview so everything is faster! 😁

Errius wrote on 2020-05-05, 06:09:

I tested a PCIe x1 variant of this GPU with 512 MB GDDR3 a while ago. The test system was a 3.4 GHz P4 with 2 GB DDR2-533 RAM ru […]
Show full quote

I tested a PCIe x1 variant of this GPU with 512 MB GDDR3 a while ago. The test system was a 3.4 GHz P4 with 2 GB DDR2-533 RAM running Windows 7 Pro 32-bit:

3DMark2001: 13238
3DMark2003: 8463
3DMark2005: 4803
3DMark2006: 2694

Seems that in Linux the Core2 E8600 compensate the o.s. differences speed compatiblity cause with a P4 661 3,6ghz numbers were way lower.
Thanks. 😀