Why not go much newer? There are plenty of cheap sandy/ivy bridges being sold now by people just upgrading now, not to mention you can actually find things like CPU coolers for those processors.

Not sure about GPUs - my XP system has a 7970, but that doesn't seem to have the best compatibility with older games, maybe something like a 6xx/7xx nvidia card is a better idea.

The XP era really lasted from 2002 to 2010ish, with most new hardware continuing to have XP support into 2012-2013. Building a ~2004-5-era XP system to run 2004-era XP games is a bit masochistic; those games run soooooo much better on newer hardware.

(FWIW, my system at the time it was released couldn't run Doom 3. Something about Doom 3 caused mad artifacting with my ATI AiW 9800 Pro. Never figured out if it was drivers, heat, or anything else.)

I would say Pentium 4s and GeForce FXes and the like are Windows 98 hardware, not XP. Even though, of course, back in the day, 95%+ of those ran XP...

My own Windows XP build started out as a Core2Duo before eventually upgrading to an i7-3770k (see link in my signature). Part of this was driven by upgrading to a 1920x1200 resolution monitor and wanting to maximize performance in 3D games in that resolution.

Personally, I would go Core2Duo as a minimum, if not faster. I wouldn't really bother with a Pentium 4 or Althon XP for Windows XP, until you're specifically going for a period correct build. Those are better suited to Windows 98 builds.

GPU kind of depends again on intended resolution and performance. I would tend to go faster if possible (e.g. something more modern).

RAM I would just max out at ~4 GB. 32-bit Windows XP can only use up to ~3.2 GB anyway.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:14:

My own Windows XP build started out as a Core2Duo before eventually upgrading to an i7-3770k (see link in my signature). Part of this was driven by upgrading to a 1920x1200 resolution monitor and wanting to maximize performance in 3D games in that resolution.

Back in the day, I was playing 1600x1200 on a 1.9GHz Willamette with a GF3 Ti500... 😀 But you must be playing late-XP era games.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:14:

RAM I would just max out at ~4 GB. 32-bit Windows XP can only use up to ~3.2 GB anyway.

Note that having more than 4GB of RAM does open some dual-booting possibilities to modern operating systems. An ivy bridge machine (or even a C2Q) can quite nicely dual boot to 10 or even unsupported 11, but that will need more RAM. A lot more RAM.

32-bit XP will happily ignore any RAM it can't use, it's not like 98SE which needs patches, etc.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:12:

Why not go much newer? There are plenty of cheap sandy/ivy bridges being sold now by people just upgrading now, not to mention y […]
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Why not go much newer? There are plenty of cheap sandy/ivy bridges being sold now by people just upgrading now, not to mention you can actually find things like CPU coolers for those processors.

Not sure about GPUs - my XP system has a 7970, but that doesn't seem to have the best compatibility with older games, maybe something like a 6xx/7xx nvidia card is a better idea.

The XP era really lasted from 2002 to 2010ish, with most new hardware continuing to have XP support into 2012-2013. Building a ~2004-5-era XP system to run 2004-era XP games is a bit masochistic; those games run soooooo much better on newer hardware.

(FWIW, my system at the time it was released couldn't run Doom 3. Something about Doom 3 caused mad artifacting with my ATI AiW 9800 Pro. Never figured out if it was drivers, heat, or anything else.)

I would say Pentium 4s and GeForce FXes and the like are Windows 98 hardware, not XP. Even though, of course, back in the day, 95%+ of those ran XP...

Thanks for reply. Going newer is on option of course but I want to play it safe concerning the backwards compability. The reason why I want to build xp rig is to have a platform that runs the xp games the way they were meant to run. After running much trouble to get these games working on my windows 11 machine I want to take the easy route now and want to get as much comtemporay hardwise as possible.

But sure thing if newer stuff is more easily available and has no problems concerning the backwards compability I will look into newer stuff as well asap.

[my own Windows XP build started out as a Core2Duo before eventually upgrading to an i7-3770k (see link in my signature). Part of this was driven by upgrading to a 1920x1200 resolution monitor and wantiquote=Shponglefan post_id=1204929 time=1698002062 user_id=34232]
Mng to maximize performance in 3D games in that resolution.

Personally, I would go Core2Duo as a minimum, if not faster. I wouldn't really bother with a Pentium 4 or Althon XP for Windows XP, until you're specifically going for a period correct build. Those are better suited to Windows 98 builds.

GPU kind of depends again on intended resolution and performance. I would tend to go faster if possible (e.g. something more modern).

RAM I would just max out at ~4 GB. 32-bit Windows XP can only use up to ~3.2 GB anyway.
[/quote]

Thanks for your reply as well. As mentioned above backwards compability is the main reason I was considering the early cpu. I just want hassle free win xp gaming experience with nice sounds. If more modern cpu are capable of giving me that experience I am more than happy to consider dual core cpu and move away from the old athlon and p4 cpu.

Same games for the graphics cards. If more modern cards are capable of giving me a hassle free xperience I will pick them.

What resolution and frame rates are you after? Some are looking to relive the experience they had in the early 2000s with their Pentium 4 or Socket A machine, and want to build something similar, and are willing to settle for reduced details and lower resolutions. Other want something that's better than they ever had. My semi overkill Windows XP machine is based on an Asus P5Q Pro with a Xeon X5460 combined with a Radeon HD 6850. I can play Half-Life 2 at 1280x1024 with all of the settings at maximum. My Socket 939 system has an Opteron 180 with an AGP HD3850, and even with the CPU @ 2,700 MHz I still have to reduce the resolution and turn down the details a bit.

My recommendation would be Socket 775 or later, and the best PCIe card that's supported by XP. The good news is that older 1150, 1155 systems and cards like the HD 6850 are at the bottom of the depreciation curve, and can be had for low prices, sometimes even for free. I have a 775 system I picked up from the curb that I combined with a GTS 250 that I got for free, and it played HL2 very well.

I’d do a low power build with a 35w Ivy bridge, 55w Geforce GTX 750, & Sata SSD.

Should be an amazing XP build.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:18:

Back in the day, I was playing 1600x1200 on a 1.9GHz Willamette with a GF3 Ti500... 😀 But you must be playing late-XP era games.

It will run Crysis at >100 FPS. 😉

Note that having more than 4GB of RAM does open some dual-booting possibilities to modern operating systems. An ivy bridge machine (or even a C2Q) can quite nicely dual boot to 10 or even unsupported 11, but that will need more RAM. A lot more RAM.

32-bit XP will happily ignore any RAM it can't use, it's not like 98SE which needs patches, etc.

True, dual booting with a 64-bit OS could be an option with more RAM.

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:21:

Thanks for reply. Going newer is on option of course but I want to play it safe concerning the backwards compability. The reason why I want to build xp rig is to have a platform that runs the xp games the way they were meant to run. After running much trouble to get these games working on my windows 11 machine I want to take the easy route now and want to get as much comtemporay hardwise as possible.

But sure thing if newer stuff is more easily available and has no problems concerning the backwards compability I will look into newer stuff as well asap.

The problem is basically this - back then, unlike now, hardware was improving really quickly. You could not buy a top of the line system in, say, summer 2004 and run Doom 3 at 1600x1200 or maybe even 1280x1024 at the highest detail settings. The expectation was that newer, much better hardware would come along in the next year or two or three, and so that's why the developers gave you those settings. This is the same reason there's all this 'but can it run Crysis?' memes - Crysis was the same way, a game that pushed the upper boundaries of the hardware for years after its release.

Now, if the game was badly written (*cough* EA...), there's certainly a possibility that it would break on that newer hardware for whatever reason. And depending on the game developer, that may or may not have been patched. But that's more an issue with games from 2000-1 that were really designed for 98SE that were patched kicking and screaming to run on XP because they couldn't ignore that NT thing anymore.

My view would be - build yourself a late XP machine. If some early 2000s titles are unhappy, and some easily could be, then once you know what those titles are and why they're unhappy, you can think about maybe building an earlier machine... but I think you're more likely to be happy overall with that approach than if you build a period-correct single-core 2004-era machine with an FX5900 or a Ti4600 and expect a 2023-caliber experience in 2004 games.

Also, newer is cheaper. You can buy a 7970 or a 780Ti on eBay for maybe... half?... or less the price of a top-tier AGP Ti4600-type GPU. Someone down the street is probably selling an ivy bridge mobo with a 3570/3570k right now. Or maybe even selling a full system with a GPU that will perform grrrrrrreat in XP! So unless your needs are really specialized, why would you spend 4X as much to buy hardware with 1/20th the performance that retro enthusiasts are snatching up to build high-powered 98 SE systems?

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:21:

As mentioned above backwards compability is the main reason I was considering the early cpu. I just want hassle free win xp gaming experience with nice sounds. If more modern cpu are capable of giving me that experience I am more than happy to consider dual core cpu and move away from the old athlon and p4 cpu.

Same games for the graphics cards. If more modern cards are capable of giving me a hassle free xperience I will pick them.

I wouldn't worry too much about backwards compatibility especially for the games you list in the OP. It's less of an issue for that era given the lengthy lifespan of Windows XP usage.

In my own system I've tested almost 50 games from mid-90s to late 2000s. The only two games that didn't work was the GoG version of Rainbow Six (which seems to be a GoG-specific issue) and SimTower.

Everything else has worked great.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:35:

I wouldn't worry too much about backwards compatibility especially for the games you list in the OP. It's less of an issue for that era given the lengthy lifespan of Windows XP usage.

In my own system I've tested almost 50 games from mid-90s to late 2000s. The only two games that didn't work was the GoG version of Rainbow Six (which seems to be a GoG-specific issue) and SimTower.

Everything else has worked great.

Have you tried NFS Porsche Unleashed? That's the one that's given me the most trouble... and to be honest, even back in the day, that game was a bit temperamental on XP. Typical of the games that came out in like 2000-1 where they really wanted to continue the 'we'll just give you an error message if you try to run this on NT 4/2000' policy but couldn't anymore.

(That being said, there seems to be a modern third-party renderer for it, that seems to work reliablyish on a late-XP-era graphics card...)

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:42:

Have you tried NFS Porsche Unleashed? That's the one that's given me the most trouble... and to be honest, even back in the day, that game was a bit temperamental on XP. Typical of the games that came out in like 2000-1 where they really wanted to continue the 'we'll just give you an error message if you try to run this on NT 4/2000' policy but couldn't anymore.

I've only tried that one on my Win 98 build, haven't tried it on my XP build.

Interestingly the box does explicitly say it's not supported on NT or Win 2000 systems.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:47:

I've only tried that one on my Win 98 build, haven't tried it on my XP build.

I'm trying to build a 98 machine for it, but... 98 is stubborn and doesn't really want to install. (See my thread from yesterday) Realistically I doubt I will get back to trying 98 until Christmas time...

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:47:

Interestingly the box does explicitly say it's not supported on NT or Win 2000 systems.

That was standard EA policy back then. Add a few lines of code to check for NT 4 and Win2000 and give an error message, put that language on the box, done, now EA doesn't need to think about NT-based Windows. When XP launched, well, that policy of ignoring NT-based Windows wasn't sustainable anymore.

But they did at least release one patch that was aimed at XP compatibility... and certainly, back in the day, it mostly worked fine on a single-core XP machine with 2001-3-era GPUs.

This is what I run XP on:
Intel Xeon E3-1245 V2
Asus P8P67 LE
4GB 1866 MHZ DDR3 (2x2GB)
Geforce GTX970
Creative X-Fi
240GB Kingston SSD

My advice would be to go with "newish" core i5 or i7 hardware, several generations are fully supported in XP.

I don't mean to be policing these forums, and I tend to think of myself as more of a guest here. I take it that "theiceman085" is the same user as "predator_085", with the same thread themes with only slight variations spaced in time at a constant rhythm, the same templated responses, same sentence structure, etc. I don't know why would someone here have 2 accounts registered in the same month, with more or less 150 replies each, if it's AI generated or if it's just human baiting for some reason. But its recurrence has been discussed. So I'll just paste an excerpt from my reply to the last thread from "predator_085":

"I understand that the OP likes to check every possible issue or hardware/software possibilities but I recall quite some threads from his part that give me a strong sense of some kind of analysis paralysis. What's funny is that he often complements (and thanks for) the advice given with a lot of info and opinion of his own, as if it's not news to him, but for some reason he did not want to make a decision himself..."

I then took the care to reply to the actual thread with the care and consideration a human would deserve, but I'm not so sure of that anymore. But anyway, please have some respect for the people here, their willingness to help, and their time.

Don't waste your time with a P4, it will bottleneck in most later WinXP games. C2D or Phenom II x2 at a minimum.

Making a WinXP build is pretty easy: just get the latest hardware that still officially supports the OS and you're good to go. Compared to Win98, there are far fewer compatibility issues under WinXP.

As others have mentioned, Ivy Bridge + GTX 980 is a commonly used setup which can max out any WinXP game released up to 2010 using the 1600x1200 or 1920x1080 resolution, with AA and AF cranked up as desired. Throw in an X-Fi Titanium sound card for EAX5 support, and you're done.

I would also recommend dual-booting with Win7, because some later titles like BioShock and Crysis have additional visual effects when running in DirectX 10 mode.

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:01:

Shall I look for a fast Pentium 4 or a Athlon 64 or mabye even a Intel Core2duo?

Definitely at least a Dual Core. An i3-3220 should have all the power you need. It outperforms the quad cores from the Core2 generation while you avoid the issues with games that unstable on more than 2 cores in the most convenient way possible buy having just 2 cores. Maybe you'd have to disable HT, but that's all.

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:01:

Which motherboards would you recommend?

XP is not too picky about those, unless you want to OC, just about anything works. Decide what form factor you want and what level of services do you need.

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:01:

Which gpu would suit my needs best? The FX series or something more mordern like the geforce 6 or maybe even the geforce 8800 series?

There are some issues between GPUs more modern than the GF7 series with SOME games, but nothing that can't be worked around. On the other hand you definitely need more performance than what the GF7 can offer. I think the sweet spot is, when it comes to heat production, physical size and performance is the GTX650 or its rebrand, the GT740. The former offers Shadowplay if you want a convenient way to record your gameplay.

theiceman085 wrote on 2023-10-22, 19:01:

How about the ram? 1 gb ram or more?

4GB. Messing with PAE is unnecessary, but maxing out at 4GB doesn't hurt.

Also, get an X-fi.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-10-23, 05:45:

I would also recommend dual-booting with Win7, because some later titles like BioShock and Crysis have additional visual effects when running in DirectX 10 mode.

But... at that point, would those titles play fine on a modern machine running 10/11?

From a P4 1.4GHz at the one end to a dual Xeon E5-2690v2 at the other.
The early core i CPUs would work, the core i7-3770k is a popular choice because its powerful and cheap in the mid range of "ultimate XP" PCs. and then you have the high end dual Xeon with a last of the line GPU that nobody needs the power of at the high end.

Snap up those XP PCs now because in 10-20 years time the future Vogons wont be talking about Windows 7 gaming systems, Vista to Windows 11 will go the way of Windows 3.11. Its there in the past but nobody really uses it and nobody considers it for gaming purposes at all.