I don’t see a downside to dual-booting. Though in-period I only ever had XP on my S478 P4 systems.

Whether dual booting is worth it will come down to specific games / hardware you intend to use. For example, if you want to use A3D audio, you'll want Windows 98, but for EAX audio you could use either 98 or XP.

Windows 98 will also give you a native DOS option if you happen to want to play any DOS games. Whereas with XP you'll need to use DOSBox.

For RAM, you can still use more than 1 GB. I use 2GB of RAM in my multi-boot P4 which includes Win 98 and XP. You'll just need to install the Rloew memory patch for Windows 98.

Great ideas! I didn't need much convincing to do dual boot. So far, I haven't had a machine in need to experiment with the memory patch. Now that I do have a "modern vintage" PC, I'll play with all possible Win 9x updates/patches.

My view: in retroland, this is probably a 98SE machine. Back in the day of course you would have run XP on it. You might as well have some fun with dual booting, but... I'd also encourage you to keep your eyes open for a late XP retro machine. Especially with the Windows 10 end of support this year, there's plentiful Sandy/Ivy Bridge hardware that would make a great late XP system.

a dual boot is fine and even if you have "only" 1gb ram its more than enough for all your late 1990's and early 2000's games anyway, there is no need to over spec when you have a known software range like that, there would be no perceivable benefit. both 98se and XP will fly along happily on a 2.4g p4.

it sounds like $10 well spent 😀

What do you want to do with it?

Consider that a lot of people skipped Vista so the "Windows XP" era ran from 2001 to 2009. This PC is from the very beginning of that period, so no way is it going to run later XP stuff (Crysis...). I would only consider running XP on here if you have the luxury of multiple systems per OS, in which case you want a nice late system like VivienL suggested for later XP. If you don't want that many systems, this is a solid late Windows 98SE system that can use pretty much all hardware that Windows 98 software uses, and is fast enough to run all that software.

It looks like there's no wrong answer really (as I thought).

I'm doing it for the fun and to justify using such a transitional period hardware. What a better use for it than some gaming!?
I have almost no experience with games from yearly 200s on, so I'll see what works on what.

I just got the bug to play with vintage again and it's only going downslope from here.

I have two just XP dedicated boxes - a H61M / i7-3770/GTX 750 (2011) and a 965G/Q6600/Quadro 2000 (2007).
I also have another potential late candidate for XP - A78 FM2+/Athlon X4 860K/GTX750 but I just repurposed it for TrueNAS/Emby server.
I've also got two DOS/98 ready machines - BX440 Slot 1/800/FX5600XT (1999), 5ALI61 Socket 7/MMX233/TNT2.
I need to replace caps on a MVP3 hoping to resurrect it and to mount K6-2+ 500/MX440 on it.

Apple][ wrote on 2025-01-03, 19:19:

I have two just XP dedicated boxes - a H61M / i7-3770/GTX 750 (2011) and a 965G/Q6600/Quadro 2000 (2007). I also have another po […]
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I have two just XP dedicated boxes - a H61M / i7-3770/GTX 750 (2011) and a 965G/Q6600/Quadro 2000 (2007).
I also have another potential late candidate for XP - A78 FM2+/Athlon X4 860K/GTX750 but I just repurposed it for TrueNAS/Emby server.
I've also got two DOS/98 ready machines - BX440 Slot 1/800/FX5600XT (1999), 5ALI61 Socket 7/MMX233/TNT2.
I need to replace caps on a MVP3 hoping to resurrect it and to mount K6-2+ 500/MX440 on it.

Given that you've already got two late XP builds and two early to mid Win9x builds, I'd say the P4 2.4 GHz is more suitable for late Win9x as it can't compete with i7-3770 (last, fastest to run XP without modding) or Q6600 (among the last CPU capable of running Win9x with appropriate MB and other hardware) under XP. Besides, while your P3-800 is good enough for most contemporary Win9x games at 1024x768 or lower resolutions, it might struggle a bit if you want to crank it up to Full HD on a modern monitor. Therefore I'd say this P4 could be your ultimate Win9x build unless you want to acquire some very specific "ultimate Win9x MB" like ASRock 775i65G R3.0.

I see your point. That's why I posted what else I have, so it's seen in the context.
BTW, I'm running a Win 11 on a Z77 board with Xeon E3-1275 V2 on it from 2012. If it stops updating, I can turn it into an XP box.
My wife says I've started wasting my time... again. Please tell me I don't!

Apple][ wrote on 2025-01-03, 20:04:

I see your point. That's why I posted what else I have, so it's seen in the context.
BTW, I'm running a Win 11 on a Z77 board with Xeon E3-1275 V2 on it from 2012. If it stops updating, I can turn it into an XP box.
My wife says I've started wasting my time... again. Please tell me I don't!

It gets harder, but I've managed to get my Ivy Bridge machine to dual boot 11 24H2 and XP. 24H2 protests a lot more about the BIOS/MBR layout (which it confuses with 'secure boot')... 23H2 and earlier was easy to get installed on 'unsupported' hardware.

We try finding a use of the old vintage stuff and usually gaming is the first thing that comes to mind.

I'm going off topic but it's a funny story.

Our accounting still uses a DOS application from 2000 and a QuickBooks from 2008. For those we keep an XP box from 2004. It's in a very bad shape. I can't even ghost it or back it up because of hdd bad sectors.

Accountants are very protective in general and don't like changes. Our accountant's main PC is an old Win 10 box from 2015. Recently, we had problems with the DOS database package, so I had to force some changes.

I moved the DOS stuff to a DosBox and the QuickBooks to a VirtualBox XP VM on the Win 10 PC.
So it's a funny situation running two different retro VMs on a pathetic Windows 10 hardware.

Also, I have a guy still doing production drafting on ClarisCad from 1993 on a G3 machine from 1998.

My point is there's still room for vintage hardware and software usage outside of the gaming scope, not even counting old working CNC machinery using old resources.

The FX5600 is not a very good XP/DX9 graphics card, but it's a price/performance champion for W98. The PC as a whole is very early XP era, a 2003 budget build.

So it depends on what you want. It's great for an authentic mid-2000s Win XP SP2 experience. But it will struggle with its period correct games. It shouldn't have any major issues with late-90s games running on Win98SE and for those it has all the performance you need for up to 1280×960 resolution at least.

I couldn't find an "AOpen AX-P4G-UN" but I did find this - is this your board? AOpen
AX4SG-UN

Yes, it is. I apologize for my mistake. It's a typo.

I have a similar board - mine's an Asus P4P 800. For the fun of it, I set it up as a maxed out 2004/2005 system and played Doom 3 on it. But I also got an 1155 system for free, set it up with XP, and I can play the Doom3 with all of the settings maxed out rather than 1024x768. But none of this is written in stone, do what you like and have fun.

If its a build just for the fun of it why not go in-between and install Windows 2000 for something different?
Personally, I install Win2k and 98 on my "Win9x builds" and only drop back to Win98 for the few games that don't work.
Overall Windows 2000 feels a lot more retro then XP and behaves better then Win98

Nothing newer than Windows 98 should be used for a retro build... Windows XP is still good enough for light modern use.

mockingbird wrote on 2025-01-06, 05:41:

Nothing newer than Windows 98 should be used for a retro build... Windows XP is still good enough for light modern use.

In terms of performance and software capabilities maybe, but in terms of security: absolutely not. XP is new enough to run contemporary malware but out of support so defenceless against it. Whether you want to use it for retro builds is up to you (the fact 32b WinXP still can run 16b code means you can run old Win3.x things on it; also it still supports hardware accelerated positional audio, which is also a valid retro use case) but please don't use XP for daily work.

dionb wrote on 2025-01-06, 06:59:

In terms of performance and software capabilities maybe, but in terms of security: absolutely not. XP is new enough to run contemporary malware but out of support so defenceless against it. Whether you want to use it for retro builds is up to you (the fact 32b WinXP still can run 16b code means you can run old Win3.x things on it; also it still supports hardware accelerated positional audio, which is also a valid retro use case) but please don't use XP for daily work.

I don't want to sound disputatious but I have to disagree. I was using XP as a daily driver up until a few months ago... The only reason I switched is because of the memory limitations and needing many tabs open in a browser.

In other words, security was not an issue.