Reply 40 of 56, by GodsPetMonkey
My absolute end of the line, overkill XP machine is:
CPU: Xeon E5-1680 v2 (set to 4.0GHz on all 8 cores, though plenty powerful enough at stock for anything XP)
Mobo: ASUS Rampage IV (X79 chipset, LGA 2011)
RAM: 32GB DDR3 2400MHz (obviously only 4GB usable in XP 32-bit)
GPU: Geforce GTX 980 (officially supported in XP using 344.11 drivers, all others need modification, but will work)
Sound: X-Fi Titanium
Now, this computer actually does triple duty with XP 32-bit, Windows 7 and as a Hackintosh. More than capable of running Windows 10 and pretty modern gaming, though the lack of AVX2 is going to be an issue soon enough.
All of the hardware is properly supported in XP, no mucking about. Haven't had any compatibility problems yet (but I also have an overkill AGP based system for Win98 and early XP if needed). You can get XP running on much later hardware as other have shown, but it does take some messing about and you are on your own if your favourite game doesn't work.
From my benchmarking, performance does continue to scale all the way up to the top of line for LGA 2011... but that's mostly visible in dedicated benchmarks. For actual game performance, there is little difference in XP between any of the Core i* architectures. X58 and X79 platforms come with a memory bandwidth advantage (and tend to be receptive to a solid overclock), but motherboards are still expensive. For consumer Sandy/Ivy Bridge, motherboards are cheap and plentiful, and you can save a buck on the CPU by not picking the i7 - the best-in-socket CPUs still carry a premium. i5s are cheap, and the Hyperthreading the i7s bring makes little difference in XP. There's a pretty big drop off if you are going back as far as Core2 CPUs, but the late Core2Duos and Core2Quads were incredibly good overclockers, though they will still fall a little short (my Core2 QX9650 @4.0GHz can't match my stock Westmere X5680 or Sandy Bridge i5 2500K... and they have good overclocking potential as well).
An i7 3770k based system is going to be great for double-duty as an XP system and good-enough daily driver.