First post, by Sigtryggr
- Rank
- Newbie
PREFACE: Please note that I found a similar thread on this forum board, but it is getting fairly old, so I'm going to heed the advice that was generated by the forum software and create a new thread. It may also be helpful to add the fact that we have a need to employ an old [expensive] multichannel (MC) audio authoring utility that was written exclusively for Windows XP x86. An audio engineer, who is well-known to be an authority with this particular software, has advised us to either build or purchase a standalone Win XP x86 PC for our project. In other words, using Win XP x86 as a VM will not work IAW this engineer. Lastly ... although I used to build PCs, right up to the Win 98 days, we made the move to Mac machines long ago, so, for all intents, I'm a PC rookie again. Anyway, here goes ...
I recently built an ASRock Z68 Pro3-M mATX machine with a Core I3-2150 CPU installed. After several headaches, that I won't bore anyone else with right now, I [finally] managed to get this system working with a SATA III SSD. By way of comparison, I originally installed Win XP Pro SP3 x86 onto a SATA II HDD - in this system - via a SATA II connector on the mobo. After that install ... which went relatively well, by the way ... it took roughly 58 seconds from Power ON to see the great old XP home screen. After getting XP Pro SP3 to load onto the SATA III SSD, the same startup process takes under 15 seconds. I honestly don't know how to tell if the SSD is actually transferring at SATA III speed, but it is plugged into one of the two SATA III sockets that the mobo came from ASRock with.
This is all pretty cool, but the problem is that this mobo came to me with one of the SATA III sockets ripped off of the board. As I will be using this new/old machine to process large multichannel audio files, I'd like to employ a second SATA III storage SSD as a pseudo-slave (archive) drive. Needless to say, XP wasn't written to process large files, so any help with transferring files this large [some can be >700MB] is highly desirable.
With this in mind, I'd like to find a regular-size ATX mobo that will work well with XP Pro SP3 and, obviously, work well with a SATA III SSD. I assume that the "most modern" XP mobo available would be the obvious choice, but my assumptions aren't always right, so that's why I'm asking here on the "Latest hardware for a Windows XP 32-bit computer" thread.