Well if you've got enough money to spend, find an i7-4790K, a GeForce GTX TITAN Z, and a combination of motherboard / PSU / case that can accommodate those together.

If you are on budget then any Core i Sandy / Ivy / Haswell, a GTX 700 series, and 4GB RAM will do fine. After all WinXP only supports up to DirectX 9.0c.

dormcat wrote on 2022-08-01, 17:18:

Well if you've got enough money to spend, find an i7-4790K, a GeForce GTX TITAN Z, and a combination of motherboard / PSU / case that can accommodate those together.

If you are on budget then any Core i Sandy / Ivy / Haswell, a GTX 700 series, and 4GB RAM will do fine. After all WinXP only supports up to DirectX 9.0c.

Nice that gives me something to look for. What is the reason the GTX Titan Z is so expensive? Is it because it still holds up or something?

Since XP predates SATA, you'll run into the F6 disk issue unless you slipstream drivers onto the CD.
Some people are allergic to using CD-Rs and drives. If you are, be aware there will be hoops to jump through and third party tools needed to install from USB drives, since no one did that before the netbook craze at which point installing from USB caught on virtually overnight, at which point XP development was long frozen.
USB 3.0 is a problematic area too.

You could also look into AMD (Socket AM3+) if you're feeling that for some reason. The last of the line FX CPUs for that socket are comparable to Sandy Bridge if I remember right, and performance per watt is quite poor. But, some of those boards might have official XP support or even onboard floppy, like the ASRock 980DE3/U3S3 I have.

From which year to which year?

What are the additional things you are interested in?

XP era stuff (pre-2010) don't really benefit from having more than 2 cores, so you probably wouldn't see much improvement with the i7 over an i3-4370.
Unmodded XP is limited to 3.5GB RAM which can be detected lower depending on the modules you find.
If you want to max out everything XP era with 60fps in 1600×1200, then you should go for something like a GTX670; GTX680, GTX760 or GTX770 (these last 2 are basically rebrands of the formers).
Sound Blaster X-fi is a must.

If you want to go cool&quiet, the i3 has a 35W TDP variant that can be cooled passively.

Just set the SATA controller to something like IDE or Legacy and you'll do fine in the setup process.
(no AHCI or RAID, then you will need the notorious F6 driver)

jakethompson1 wrote on 2022-08-01, 18:28:

Since XP predates SATA, you'll run into the F6 disk issue unless you slipstream drivers onto the CD. Some people are allergic to […]
Show full quote

Since XP predates SATA, you'll run into the F6 disk issue unless you slipstream drivers onto the CD.
Some people are allergic to using CD-Rs and drives. If you are, be aware there will be hoops to jump through and third party tools needed to install from USB drives, since no one did that before the netbook craze at which point installing from USB caught on virtually overnight, at which point XP development was long frozen.
USB 3.0 is a problematic area too.

You could also look into AMD (Socket AM3+) if you're feeling that for some reason. The last of the line FX CPUs for that socket are comparable to Sandy Bridge if I remember right, and performance per watt is quite poor. But, some of those boards might have official XP support or even onboard floppy, like the ASRock 980DE3/U3S3 I have.

There's a few mentions of the F6 issue can you briefly explain that? I don't mind using CDs at all that's how I did all my Windows 95-98se stuff.

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-08-01, 20:03:

From which year to which year? […]
Show full quote

From which year to which year?

What are the additional things you are interested in?

XP era stuff (pre-2010) don't really benefit from having more than 2 cores, so you probably wouldn't see much improvement with the i7 over an i3-4370.
Unmodded XP is limited to 3.5GB RAM which can be detected lower depending on the modules you find.
If you want to max out everything XP era with 60fps in 1600×1200, then you should go for something like a GTX670; GTX680, GTX760 or GTX770 (these last 2 are basically rebrands of the formers).
Sound Blaster X-fi is a must.

If you want to go cool&quiet, the i3 has a 35W TDP variant that can be cooled passively.

Those cards do keep coming up in discussion threads so I think I'll definitely keep an eye out for them. In terms of years I'd say up until Vista or even 7 was released so pre-2010 sounds perfect. I am curious though because I keep seeing that Titan card come up too, just what about that card is so special?

Tyrant wrote on 2022-08-01, 23:09:

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-08-01, 20:03:

From which year to which year? […]
Show full quote

From which year to which year?

What are the additional things you are interested in?

XP era stuff (pre-2010) don't really benefit from having more than 2 cores, so you probably wouldn't see much improvement with the i7 over an i3-4370.
Unmodded XP is limited to 3.5GB RAM which can be detected lower depending on the modules you find.
If you want to max out everything XP era with 60fps in 1600×1200, then you should go for something like a GTX670; GTX680, GTX760 or GTX770 (these last 2 are basically rebrands of the formers).
Sound Blaster X-fi is a must.

If you want to go cool&quiet, the i3 has a 35W TDP variant that can be cooled passively.

Those cards do keep coming up in discussion threads so I think I'll definitely keep an eye out for them. In terms of years I'd say up until Vista or even 7 was released so pre-2010 sounds perfect. I am curious though because I keep seeing that Titan card come up too, just what about that card is so special?

Simply the Titan is just the fastest card that has XP drivers. Totally overkill and you'll be severely CPU limited with everything XP era. The release of Windows 7 was 2009 fall, Vista was 2006. Pre-Vista for games is firmly single-core CPU territory. Imo with anything quad core and GPU GT200 or faster you should consider dual booting a more modern 64bit OS.