Reply 24200 of 28625, by Sombrero
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- Oldbie
The urge to build a proper WinME/2k system I've had for some time now keeps getting stronger and has proceeded to planning phase. Pretty much settled with a LGA 775 AGP build for reasons but there's an issue: I already have a LGA 775 Pentium 4 PCIe system for late Win9x - early WinXP games and the new system is going to overlap with it a lot.
The solution: joink the Cedar Mill P4 out of there and shove it in the new system once it starts materializing and upgrade the old machine, so the Asus P5K / P4 3.4GHz got replaced with Asus P5Q Deluxe / C2D E8600. I didn't really NEED to swap the motherboard as P5K supports E8600 but I've had couple issues with it, namely I couldn't get AHCI to work and also there's something iffy with USB2 with it. If I set it to full HiSpeed (480 Mbps) in BIOS the system hangs once it starts loading OS and also if I try to install an OS, but if I set it to FullSpeed (12 Mbps) the system loads OS just fine and weirdly USB still seems to work at full HiSpeed as far as I can tell. So when I stumbled upon a cheap Asus P5Q Deluxe I figured why not.
So now I've got a C2D system that is faster, more power efficient and quieter. Just two problems:
1. Once the WinME/2k system is up and running it's going to take care of games from 1999-2002. And I also already have an Ivy Bridge system that can take care of nearly all DirectX 9-11 era games up to 2013 or so. Meaning the only use for this system is going to be for games that don't like to play nice with a too modern GPU like GTX 960 and I'm currently aware of exactly ONE game like that in my collection, and I haven't yet even confirmed that yet.
2. C2D is boring to me. Hardware starts getting unintersting to me in general around that time period, it's superior to P4 in every way but I find it so very bland in comparison. Also now I need to start keeping my eye out for games that might not like two CPU cores and force them to use only one.
Yeah this system might not get much use in the long run, but we'll see. Maybe I'll find use for it as a backup/testbench machine.