Your options are practically unlimited. Windows XP is usable on any motherboard built in the last 15 years.

What games do you want to run? How well do you want them to run? The answers to these questions will determine which video cards would be appropriate for your goal, which in turn will limit your motherboard choices.

If you go 775 era be sure to look for any ddr3 capable boards as they are faster than most ddr2 boards. The difference at the very high end in both is small but compared to most it is large enough to notice, got two core2 era laptops running ddr3 and very easily notice the difference vs older ddr2 machines.

Last month I built a budget computer around the Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H. It runs perfectly, with everything having drivers, and the PC being able to go to sleep mode and wake. It's also pretty fast and quiet for the price. There don't seem to be much reason to look at used 775 boards, unless you want to use a PCI soundcard, designed for realtime operation, which doesn't want to mate with modern motherboards. Those are often discussed as problematic, and one reason why I would personally use XP.

I'm not sure I would recommend Socket A for Windows XP as later stuff can, and does, take advantage of multi-cores.

If you wanted to stay with an AMD-based system I would suggest at a minimum starting with Socket 939, probably on an nForce 4, as that was highly popular during it's time. I'd imagine you could go right through AM3+ but I think Intel would be the better choice for absolute performance.

For Intel there's no reason to look any older than Core 2. It really dominated AMD during the time, and the momentum has kept Intel on top for the past 6 years. It's relatively cheap to get right now, save for some of the "tick" quad cores--i.e., Q9450, Q9550, QX9650, etc). It has single core, dual core and quad core options. There are at least 6 chipsets that I would recommend for them: P35, X38, P45, X48, nForce 6 and nForce 7 (I guess it's actually more than 6 because there's at least 2 nForce chipsets per version). DDR3-based desktops are pretty expensive/hard to find. DDR3 was new, expensive and didn't make as big of an impact to justify for a lot of people so they stayed on DDR2. Off the top of my head that only chipsets that offered DDR3 support were a few X48 motherboards--most were still DDR2--and all the nForce 790i, but they were less popular than the DDR2 780i boards. If overclocking quad cores I'd really focus on P45, X48, and nForce 7 as I remember a lot of people complaining the earlier chipsets didn't overclock quads anywhere near as well as they did dual cores. You could probably also go up to current motherboards but I would really only look at Core 2 or possibly Nehalem if I was building something dedicated for Windows XP.

For CPU all you need to remember is Q6600 SLACR. It can be overclocked to ridiculous levels on air alone. Grab one before they become collectible and prices soar.

My very last machine on XP was AMD based. It had an Athlon II processor, 4 GB Ram, a Geforce 9600GT and a Sound Blaster X-Fi.

I was very happy with that machine. A Core 2 Duo platform would also be very nice.

The other challenge is matching driver versions with video cards and games. Bioshock for example broke with later Nvidia drivers and BF2142 did the same when using AA. That will be especially true for very old games like Splinter Cell that uses special shadow features that only work correctly on old cards.

My very last machine on XP was AMD based. It had an Athlon II processor, 4 GB Ram, a Geforce 9600GT and a Sound Blaster X-Fi.

I was very happy with that machine. A Core 2 Duo platform would also be very nice.

The other challenge is matching driver versions with video cards and games. Bioshock for example broke with later Nvidia drivers and BF2142 did the same when using AA. That will be especially true for very old games like Splinter Cell that uses special shadow features that only work correctly on old cards.

PCI isn't necessary IMO as the PCIe X-Fi Titanium is the last / best X-Fi for XP. I would be surprised if there are backwards compatibility issues with that card, but you never know...

Something that supports more than 512mb of RAM and can use a 1GHz or higher CPU should be acceptable for eckspee.

478 p4 is always a good option for a xp box. Depending on your needs you can get anywhere from a 2.0ghz NorthWood to a 3.4ghz Prescott with an abundance of agp options and such. There is a place in Seattle that sells complete p4 rigs for $25 a piece! (just an example of how cheap Pentium 4's are haha)

It really depends what resolution you will be playing your games.

On a P4 2.8 and a Radeon 9800 Farcry will make the system choke. So does Doom 3 😀

If we are talking 1600 x 1200 or Full HD then you need a lot more grunt.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

The other challenge is matching driver versions with video cards and games.

That is true. Many early 3D games no longer work on modern cards or look bad without 16-bit dithering. But most PCi-E cards should be compatible with current motherboards no? The video card in my system did have some issues, and I plugged in an old Radeon X550 to test. It ran the games that I had well. A video card should probably be bought used.

I never saw any practical need for dedicated XP rigs unless someone would be after that "period-correct" experience, or testing different hardware from that time. For just playing games there are better options.

Since the vast majority of games cope fine with fast CPUs the only real setback is indeed having to use a somewhat outdated video card and keep specific old drivers around. But I've heard about people having both a "modern" video card and an older one just for XP, all with different drivers and no SLI. If that is possible it's a convenient and overall better option since for example a 8800 GT is already enough to play all "XP games" in high resolutions w/ AA+AF. Especially since most of the titles support widescreen.

j7n wrote:

That is true. Many early 3D games no longer work on modern cards or look bad without 16-bit dithering. But most PCi-E cards should be compatible with current motherboards no? The video card in my system did have some issues, and I plugged in an old Radeon X550 to test. It ran the games that I had well. A video card should probably be bought used.

You are mixing up things here... "early" 3D games are not XP territory. Did any 3D game since 2001 depend on 16-bit color depth?

EAX sound for me is a good reason to build an XP machine.

Yes there is Alchemy, but the EAX option is many games are greyed out and it's nice to have everything working as it should 😀

And why do you need a whole machine for this when you can just plug the card into your current one?

Because that has a Z which doesn't run on XP.

d1stortion wrote:

You are mixing up things here... "early" 3D games are not XP territory. Did any 3D game since 2001 depend on 16-bit color depth?

Running most Windows native games (not as early as Quake) is one reason to prefer XP over a more recent OS. They will also benefit from a video card of the 2001-2005. I do not know if the OP wants to play on this machine or not. If the game does not run in 16-bit color depth, it may depend on some other feature of the video card. I've noticed that for example, Mobil 1 Rally Championship wouldn't run on new video cards, even though it can run in True Color. I have another game which crashes because QuickTime video cannot set the required mode.

The question in this thread is not whether to use XP or not, but how to go about it hardware wise... and I don't see why you shouldn't be able to plug a 7900 GTX or whatever into a modern motherboard and have a good number of legacy features 😀

Gigabyte EP45 or ASUS P5Q series (ICH10/ICH10R + P45 Express) with a Core 2 Duo E8500 and a 2x1GB Kingston Hyper-X 1024MHz RAM kit.

sliderider wrote:

For CPU all you need to remember is Q6600 SLACR. It can be overclocked to ridiculous levels on air alone. Grab one before they become collectible and prices soar.

I do not think the Q6600 prices will soar simply because of the availability of the Q9xxx CPUs, and even the more budget-friendly Yorkfields of the Q8xxx series. They were also able to overclock well. If the Q6xxx had been the only quad cores on the platform, then yes they probably could go back up in value.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

EAX sound for me is a good reason to build an XP machine.

Yes there is Alchemy, but the EAX option is many games are greyed out and it's nice to have everything working as it should 😀

I thought about native EAX support last night as well. I just didn't have the energy to post again. If you're looking into a dedicated XP gaming system there's no reason not to grab a nice X-Fi for hardware EAX 5 support. Depending on what games too, it might be worth it trying to track down one of the Fata1ty cards instead of just the Titanium for the extra X-Ram. IIRC a few games did perform better with more X-Ram on the soundcard.

d1stortion wrote:

And why do you need a whole machine for this when you can just plug the card into your current one?

I'd say drivers could be one reason. I haven't jumped on the Haswell bandwagon myself, but from a quick look at some Asus boards, they don't have XP drivers available for them. Now it does look like the Z68/Z77 boards do, I haven't had the desire to try XP on my modern machine to see how well those drivers work. I know my sound card doesn't have XP drivers.