On the Intel side, Ivy Bridge is the last officially supported XP platform out there. Other than the need to slipstream the AHCI driver into your XP SP3 since most (all?) ivy bridge boards don't have drives, it should work just fine pretty much out of the box...

Plenty of used ivy bridge stuff available everywhere too.

Am4 and intel rocket lake CPUs can be made to work by slipstreaming drivers. You can likely get nearly any platform to work.

If it is a dedicated XP machine I don't see much point beyond sandy/ivy bridge.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-12-01, 23:18:

Am4 and intel rocket lake CPUs can be made to work by slipstreaming drivers. You can likely get nearly any platform to work.

If it is a dedicated XP machine I don't see much point beyond sandy/ivy bridge.

I would further add that the OP seems to need this for some kind of work or workish project. Sandy/ivy bridge will be easier than trying to get XP running on a platform 5 years too new (which might be a great fun idea if you were a retrocomputing YouTuber...)

One thing I didn't think about - this hardware the OP needs to use, is it PCI? PCI-E? That might affect things a little too... though... I can't remember when the last PCI slots vanished...

I use a Devil's Canyon Core i7-4790K on a H97 motherboard as my Windows XP retro rocket. Works great for me, but the board does have one bad SATA3 port (of the 6). It's been that way for a while, so it was probably a manufacturing defect. All remaining SATA3 ports operate at full speed.

My motherboard (an Asrock H97 Fatal1ty Performance) also supports NVMe booting (using a PCIE adapter), if I wanted to mess with that in Windows XP. I plan to use the feature with Windows 7 in a multi-boot configuration.

VivienM wrote on 2023-12-01, 23:27:

I would further add that the OP seems to need this for some kind of work or workish project. Sandy/ivy bridge will be easier than trying to get XP running on a platform 5 years too new (which might be a great fun idea if you were a retrocomputing YouTuber...)

One thing I didn't think about - this hardware the OP needs to use, is it PCI? PCI-E? That might affect things a little too... though... I can't remember when the last PCI slots vanished...

Agree about using Sandy or Ivy for making it easier to install XP. My asrock Z370 Pro4 board has one PCI. The Intel 200 series {x299, H310, B365 and z370} based PCH supports PCI but not all boards have one (very few do actually).....

VivienM wrote on 2023-12-01, 23:27:

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-12-01, 23:18:

Am4 and intel rocket lake CPUs can be made to work by slipstreaming drivers. You can likely get nearly any platform to work.

If it is a dedicated XP machine I don't see much point beyond sandy/ivy bridge.

I would further add that the OP seems to need this for some kind of work or workish project. Sandy/ivy bridge will be easier than trying to get XP running on a platform 5 years too new (which might be a great fun idea if you were a retrocomputing YouTuber...)

One thing I didn't think about - this hardware the OP needs to use, is it PCI? PCI-E? That might affect things a little too... though... I can't remember when the last PCI slots vanished...

First - thanks for putting your heads into this for me, folks! According to my reading, Intel B75 (Ivy Bridge) is the last bona fide XP Intel chipset and H61 (Sandy Bridge) is that last Intel CPU that can easily handle Win XP Pro SP3 x86 as well ... but this has me scratching my head. According to the *wiki article for Sandy and Ivy Bridge chipsets, the newest Z77 Ivy Bridge chipset, for example, should be capable of supporting both families of Core i7 CPUs (see the link below).

In short, I'm thinking about a Z77 mobo and a Core i7-3770K CPU combination. They're both available at reasonable prices, so the main question is whether or not this hardware combination will work with a standalone Win XP Pro SP3 x86 system via a primary SATA III SSD as the system drive?

*Link to wiki article referenced above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1155#Ivy_Br … ily_of_chipsets

By the way, the question (in the quote above) about PCI and PCI-e interfaces has me stumped. I'm assuming that this has something to do with the use of a dGPU add-on card? We really have no need for fast video processing, so I don't think this should be an issue, but I love to learn, so I'd still like to request some clarification about this ...

I have two B75 motherboards from different manufacturers, and, while I like them for other reasons, you may want to go in a different direction. The B75 chipset only supports 1 SATA3 port. All others will be SATA2. The single SATA3 port on both of my boards has some sort of issue where they do not perform well at all (it manifests as intermittent data transfers). I avoid using that particular port on both boards.

On the other hand, I have an Asus Q67 board (mATX in my case) that has two excellent SATA3 ports. When paired with a Sandy Bridge processor (but not Ivy Bridge), the ports can operate in IDE compatible mode if you need it. Otherwise, AHCI mode works just fine too. If you need an Ivy Bridge processor, the 60-series boards will work, but you'll need the latest BIOS to ensure the board supports the processor.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-02, 06:31:

First - thanks for putting your heads into this for me, folks! According to my reading, Intel B75 (Ivy Bridge) is the last bon […]
Show full quote

VivienM wrote on 2023-12-01, 23:27:

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-12-01, 23:18:

Am4 and intel rocket lake CPUs can be made to work by slipstreaming drivers. You can likely get nearly any platform to work.

If it is a dedicated XP machine I don't see much point beyond sandy/ivy bridge.

I would further add that the OP seems to need this for some kind of work or workish project. Sandy/ivy bridge will be easier than trying to get XP running on a platform 5 years too new (which might be a great fun idea if you were a retrocomputing YouTuber...)

One thing I didn't think about - this hardware the OP needs to use, is it PCI? PCI-E? That might affect things a little too... though... I can't remember when the last PCI slots vanished...

First - thanks for putting your heads into this for me, folks! According to my reading, Intel B75 (Ivy Bridge) is the last bona fide XP Intel chipset and H61 (Sandy Bridge) is that last Intel CPU that can easily handle Win XP Pro SP3 x86 as well ... but this has me scratching my head. According to the *wiki article for Sandy and Ivy Bridge chipsets, the newest Z77 Ivy Bridge chipset, for example, should be capable of supporting both families of Core i7 CPUs (see the link below).

In short, I'm thinking about a Z77 mobo and a Core i7-3770K CPU combination. They're both available at reasonable prices, so the main question is whether or not this hardware combination will work with a standalone Win XP Pro SP3 x86 system via a primary SATA III SSD as the system drive?

*Link to wiki article referenced above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1155#Ivy_Br … ily_of_chipsets

By the way, the question (in the quote above) about PCI and PCI-e interfaces has me stumped. I'm assuming that this has something to do with the use of a dGPU add-on card? We really have no need for fast video processing, so I don't think this should be an issue, but I love to learn, so I'd still like to request some clarification about this ...

Z77 and Ivy Bridges should work fine. Just pick a motherboard whose manufacturer has XP drivers on their web site, just for an additional little amount of simplicity and as a bit of a guarantee that their BIOS/UEFI doesn't do anything XP-unfriendly...

One thought: see what the non-K 3570/3770 sell for. The K is a teeny bit faster and overclockable, but IIRC, the non-Ks sell for much, much cheaper than the Ks. The 3770k, like just about every flagship processor of any generation, sells for a premium.

The PCI/PCI-e question was from me, and I may have misread your original post. Somehow, I thought you needed an XP machine to operate a piece of hardware, so I was wondering if that hardware required a PCI slot... but re-reading your post, it may be that the only thing you need is software.

Good suggestion on Z77 and i7-3770 ! Any x77 based would be a good choice IMHO (H77, Q77 or Z77) and would look for one with a PS2 port also (have had issues with USB 2.0 kb/mouse installing XP on some "supported" boards)
I keep a copy of Intels archive page on their older boards and OS support which is handy to see which chipset based Intel boards support what OS out of the box..just as a guide...
added: https://web.archive.org/web/20130212153737mp_ … b/CS-008326.htm
and the last found archive page :
https://web.archive.org/web/20151203204558/ht … b/cs-008326.htm

I'm interested to know what software they're looking to run.

From OP: "old [expensive] multichannel (MC) audio authoring utility that was written exclusively for Windows XP x86."
If me would look at an Asrock Z77 Pro4 board or equal.....Asus and MSI have some good ones but most are retarded in pricing on ebay due to the name.....

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-12-02, 18:03:

I'm interested to know what software they're looking to run.

My apologies, but the software is proprietary and somewhat specialized, so I'm hesitant to write too much about it. In short, it's used mostly for multichannel audio authoring. It can also handle multichannel audio/video scoring, so it's a pretty powerful bit of kit. Apparently, something changed between Windows XP and Vista that adversely impacted the performance of the utility and, in short, the folks who created the software decided not to update it. It should work fine for our purposes, though, so the Win XP Pro SP3 PC project is important to us.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-02, 20:26:

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-12-02, 18:03:

I'm interested to know what software they're looking to run.

My apologies, but the software is proprietary and somewhat specialized, so I'm hesitant to write too much about it. In short, it's used mostly for multichannel audio authoring. It can also handle multichannel audio/video scoring, so it's a pretty powerful bit of kit. Apparently, something changed between Windows XP and Vista that adversely impacted the performance of the utility and, in short, the folks who created the software decided not to update it. It should work fine for our purposes, though, so the Win XP Pro SP3 PC project is important to us.

Microsoft pretty much blew up the entire audio stack between XP and Vista... for the worst, as I think fans of Creative sound cards with EAX, good wavetable MIDI cards and SoundFonts etc, will tell you. So it doesn't surprise me that a specialized audio tool would not be too happy with the new way of doing things...

Horun wrote on 2023-12-02, 17:47:

Good suggestion on Z77 and i7-3770 ! Any x77 based would be a good choice IMHO (H77, Q77 or Z77) and would look for one with a P […]
Show full quote

Good suggestion on Z77 and i7-3770 ! Any x77 based would be a good choice IMHO (H77, Q77 or Z77) and would look for one with a PS2 port also (have had issues with USB 2.0 kb/mouse installing XP on some "supported" boards)
I keep a copy of Intels archive page on their older boards and OS support which is handy to see which chipset based Intel boards support what OS out of the box..just as a guide...
added: https://web.archive.org/web/20130212153737mp_ … b/CS-008326.htm
and the last found archive page :
https://web.archive.org/web/20151203204558/ht … b/cs-008326.htm

This will definitely clarify how far behind I've fallen since my last Win 98 PC building project, but I wasn't even aware that Intel manufactured motherboards! That's a very useful looking chart, though, so many thanks for the links, @Horun ! Great post!

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-02, 20:36:

Horun wrote on 2023-12-02, 17:47:

Good suggestion on Z77 and i7-3770 ! Any x77 based would be a good choice IMHO (H77, Q77 or Z77) and would look for one with a P […]
Show full quote

Good suggestion on Z77 and i7-3770 ! Any x77 based would be a good choice IMHO (H77, Q77 or Z77) and would look for one with a PS2 port also (have had issues with USB 2.0 kb/mouse installing XP on some "supported" boards)
I keep a copy of Intels archive page on their older boards and OS support which is handy to see which chipset based Intel boards support what OS out of the box..just as a guide...
added: https://web.archive.org/web/20130212153737mp_ … b/CS-008326.htm
and the last found archive page :
https://web.archive.org/web/20151203204558/ht … b/cs-008326.htm

This will definitely clarify how far behind I've fallen since my last Win 98 PC building project, but I wasn't even aware that Intel manufactured motherboards! That's a very useful looking chart, though, so many thanks for the links, @Horun ! Great post!

Intel made motherboards from the late 1990s until a few years ago. Or at least, someone (Foxconn?) made them under contract for Intel. Certainly in the mid-late 1990s the big mail-order PC vendors (Micron, Gateway 2000 before they dropped the 2000, Dell) all used lightly customized Intel boards; by the late 1990s they were definitely available as boxed retail units as well.

Great motherboards if you don't care about overclocking or some legacy features (the Taiwanese guys tended to be more conservative about dropping PS/2, PATA, etc), but I think with the death of the white box desktop PC in the 2010s, they just didn't have a market anymore and discontinued them.

VivienM wrote on 2023-12-02, 20:29:

Microsoft pretty much blew up the entire audio stack between XP and Vista... for the worst, as I think fans of Creative sound cards with EAX, good wavetable MIDI cards and SoundFonts etc, will tell you. So it doesn't surprise me that a specialized audio tool would not be too happy with the new way of doing things...

According to the audio engineer who's offered to help us with the subject software, something changed with how XML files are processed between Win XP and Vista. The utility is heavily XML dependent; hence, the need to stick with a standalone XP machine. With this in mind, I'm not surprised at all to read about hardware/software issues occurring when Mister Softy made the transition from XP to Vista.

Horun wrote on 2023-12-02, 18:46:

From OP: "old [expensive] multichannel (MC) audio authoring utility that was written exclusively for Windows XP x86."
If me would look at an Asrock Z77 Pro4 board or equal.....Asus and MSI have some good ones but most are retarded in pricing on ebay due to the name.....

The only PC mobo I've worked with in over 20 years is the ASRock Z68 Pro3-M that we started the project out with. Compared to the last mobo I recall building a PC with - an MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum with an AMD Athlon64 CPU - the ASRock Z68 board seems downright modern by comparison. I'm also pretty impressed with the tech support for the ASRock mobo, but I really have no other way of knowing if another mobo outfit made better main boards.

With this in mind, I was looking at this ASRock Z77 Extreme4 mobo: https://www.asrock.com/mb/intel/z77%20extreme … /#Specification

It looks pretty sweet, but if there's another brand, like ASUS, that made a better legacy PC mobo, I'm all for checking one out, @Horun.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-02, 20:26:

My apologies, but the software is proprietary and somewhat specialized, so I'm hesitant to write too much about it. In short, it's used mostly for multichannel audio authoring. It can also handle multichannel audio/video scoring, so it's a pretty powerful bit of kit. Apparently, something changed between Windows XP and Vista that adversely impacted the performance of the utility and, in short, the folks who created the software decided not to update it. It should work fine for our purposes, though, so the Win XP Pro SP3 PC project is important to us.

Oh no worries, I was just curious.

Since you did state it was specifically written for Windows XP, I assumed it might be something proprietary.

I used to use a Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 (gigabyte's top of the line overkill motherboard for that socket) with i7-3770K and 16 gigs of nice ram, for winXP, and it worked absolutely perfectly, full driver support for winXP on official gigabyte page, stable, reliable, compatible. I now use an Asus P9X79 WS motherboard with a Xeon E5-1680v2 and 32 gigs of nice ram. Basically doubled down on everything from the previous machine. However the winXP support is nowhere near as good. As an example, there are no winXP 32bit ahci drivers for the intel x79 chipset sata controller, only for the additional marvel sata controller. There are winXP 64bit drivers, but no 32bit ones. To access hard drives connected to the intel sata controller, I need to run them in IDE mode. Didn't have that issue with the Z77 board. So I cannot recommend X79 chipset for winXP 32bit, but I can recommend Z77 chipset. Everything just works with Z77. I had no yellow checkmarks in device manager with Z77. I do have some now with X79. Funny thing is Z77 is actually a bit newer than X79, came out like half an year later