A Pentium 4 class PC requires special talent or conscious effort to mess up, so I'm actually genuinely impressed by how effective you were at it. You don't have to pay that much attention to things other than having an AGP slot and preferably Intel chipset. Even if not optimal, almost anything should work alright.

So at this point you either get a Celeron D and make a troll build with the rest you got or just start from scratch and go to that junkyard. You should be able to get something serviceable for something like $10.

No need to go with Socket 478 / AGP machines either which are becoming harder to find.
LGA775, 1156, 1155 based systems all run XP fine and been disposed of en-mass cheaply if your on a budget.
Small Form Factor machines can be ok but limit upgrade options.
Also PCI-E graphics cards are also cheaper then AGP

Hans Tork wrote on 2024-01-04, 06:31:

I have now toned down my expectations to simply running Win XP on a retro(2005-2011) PC.

Any suggestions regarding my build would be highly appreciated.

Okay, so go and find yourself an LGA775 C2D/C2Q with DDR2/DDR3 memory, SATA, PCI-Express, etc, or a Sandy/Ivy Bridge setup, a nice XP-friendly GPU, and... done. Make sure your motherboard/system is from somebody who still has drivers/BIOSes/documentation/etc on their web site (so Asus/MSI/Gigabyte/etc tend to be good).

If you have nostalgia for the software (which I presume is the primary focus), that'll be your best bet: the software will run a ton faster than it did back in the day on your under-RAMmed 2.4GHz P4, and the hardware will be much, much more manageable. SATA ports so you can plug in modern drives, PCI-Express because, well, used PCI-Express GPUs probably give you 10X the performance per dollar of used AGP ones (good AGP video cards tend to be in huge demand for 98SE rigs), etc.

I'm in a pretty big city, so maybe it's different where you are, but I could open up Facebook Marketplace right now and find a whole range of systems/parts/etc meeting these criteria for reasonable prices.

RandomStranger wrote on 2024-01-04, 08:35:

A Pentium 4 class PC requires special talent or conscious effort to mess up, so I'm actually genuinely impressed by how effective you were at it.

I had the same reaction... and that got me thinking. I think the big issue is that the OP thought he was looking for a "retro" PC. Maybe socket 478 counts as retro (I would certainly call, say, slot 1 or socket 370 "retro"), but just about anything newer is... not really... retro, at least not yet. Maybe that will change 5 years from now if a ton of machines get e-wasted due to the Windows 11 hardware requirements.

Basically, something happened in about 2006 with the C2D and then the C2Q which caused these machines to not become obsolete the way older machines did. The original Conroe C2D is about to be old enough to vote this summer, and, with enough RAM and an SSD, it is perfectly capable of running Windows 10 (or 11 if you turn off the checking for the nonsense hardware requirements) and current basic productivity software. If, say, an enthusiast had given his aunt or grandmother his E6600 or Q6600 when he got a Sandy Bridge in 2011, the aunt or grandmother could still happily use it today, twelve years later. There were also a lot of cheap C2Q OEM systems in late 2009ish, which I think many enthusiasts recommended for people to replace Dimension 2400/3000-type XP hotburst systems and migrate to 64-bit 7; those machines would have gotten their free upgrade to Windows 10 and, assuming their owners are still living, would likely still be in use. And while they were sold for 64-bit 7, most/all of them will run 32-bit XP just fine.

So, there's this big sea of outstanding XP retro machines out there that are just... not viewed as 'retro' machines by their sellers. They're just a random aging Windows 10 machine. Or the old gaming PC they threw in the closet 5 years ago and forgot about. But a "random aging Windows 10 machine" from 2007-2012 or so is... quite likely to make an outstanding XP retro machine. And that's the beauty of XP in a way - its longevity was so high that an OS that people ran on 600MHz machines with 256 megs of RAM or less in 2001 can run on 4x3.x GHz machines with... well... 3.x gigs of RAM, but you don't need the 4x3.xGHz CPU for a great XP retro experience, a 2x2.xGHz CPU will do beautifully (assuming it's not a hotburst)...

Thanks everyone, for your suggestions.

I think I will get a 775 socket.

My biggest mistake was buying the cheap Dell Dimension motherboard which did not come with the mounting brackets for the cooler or a PCIe slot. Also I did not know I had to buy a connector for the 40 pin IDE slot.

I have been able to boot into the BIOS without a storage device. After I get the storage working, I may update about my build.

Also wanted to add, how do people here attach SSDs to the 40 pin IDE slots. What are some viable options for doing so?

You have converters from SATA to IDE which you can find for very cheap on eBay, but they are usually crap quality and performance. For example https://www.ebay.com/itm/314479176636?hash=item49386b6bbc This is completely transparent to the OS.

The most "reliable" thing to do to get a an SATA HDD/SSD in an old system is tu use a dedicated controller like this one: https://www.promise.com/media_bank/Download%2 … 2_DS_040605.pdf The OS can boot from it if you provide the drivers at installation (Windows 2000/XP and on).

Hans Tork wrote on 2024-01-05, 05:20:

Also wanted to add, how do people here attach SSDs to the 40 pin IDE slots. What are some viable options for doing so?

Why do you want to do that for an XP machine? LGA775 systems on reasonable chipsets will have native SATA ports; just plug your SSD into those, make a slipstreamed WinXP install disc that includes the "F6 driver" so you can run it in AHCI mode, done.

And please, please make sure you get a late LGA775 setup. Like a P35 or P43 chipset with the ICH9R/ICH10R and a motherboard that supports 45nm chips. I know you've got Pentium 4s on your mind, but... you don't really want a first-generation-LGA775 90nm Preshot. Or at least, if you think you do, at least get a motherboard that will let you go to some newer things - the 45nm chips in particular.

I wish you had posted here before buying that Dimension 3000 motherboard. I have some respect for the Dimension 2400/3000; my dad had one, my aunt had one, etc, but they were extremely low-end systems that you recommended for your price-sensitive elderly aunt who just needed to do some web browsing and who would never need anything fancier than the on-chipset graphics and whatever hard drive the thing came with. Great machines for their purpose 20 years ago, but I cringe at the idea of using them as a base for an enthusiasty retro project.

My recommendation is a socket 478 motherboard with Intel 865PE chipset if you are looking for something that can be classified as retro.
They typically have two SATA 1 ports and work perfectly with modern SSDs (unlike the dreaded VIA southbridge).
You can even use the CPU that you had back in the day, even though something with 800 MHz FSB would be better.

I used this on my 233 mhz PC and it quickly identified and worked great with my 8gb sata ssd

https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/ide2sat2

Update: I finally managed to get the Dell 3000 motherboard working.

It was a real slog but after using the IDE to Sata adapter to connect to my SSD, and after configuring the BIOS I have managed to boot into win XP with the help of a Dell OEM XP Cd I got from Ebay.

The integrated display was so horrible I was forced to buy a cheap FX 5200 from Ebay. I also had to use an external power connector for the CPU cooler. Another issue I had was the front panel buttons and their pins on the motherboard which were so hard to configure as the 3000 manual does not give a proper description of the pin configurations. For anyone from the future working with the 3000 motherboard it is the 3rd and 4th row which gives the power and reset capabilities to the front panel.

The total expenditure might have been way over the budget I had set while thinking about the PC but I am glad my retro PC is finally done.

My build specs:

Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz(BX80532PE2400D)
Dell Dimension 3000 ON6381 Motherboard
240 GB Acer SSD(used a IDE to SATA adapter)
512 MB DDR RAM(Plan to upgrade it to 2 GB RAM)
PNY Verto Nvidia Geforce FX 5200 256 MB PCI
DVDRW Sata driver burner(used a IDE to SATA adapter)

Once again, thanks everyone for your invaluable suggestions, especially with the adapters.

MB1723 wrote on 2024-01-05, 14:35:

I used this on my 233 mhz PC and it quickly identified and worked great with my 8gb sata ssd

https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/ide2sat2

I ended up getting one from startech and one from Kingwin. They worked without any problems.

Congratulations.
Getting these big brand OEM boards working in anything accept the original case is always a massive pain, especially if your only just getting back into the hobby.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-01-09, 00:14:

Congratulations.
Getting these big brand OEM boards working in anything accept the original case is always a massive pain, especially if your only just getting back into the hobby.

Thank you.

The forum did help me a lot. I had little to no experience with pre-2012 builds and I also did not do my research properly. I should have probably stuck with a more modern piece of hardware but I was a being a bit stubborn with the specs, especially the processor.