Nice system, somewhat similar to mine.
My suggestions are:
- For windows XP, stay with a 6 series Radeon, so there are at least some driver choices with proper OpenGL. AMD/ATI XP drivers are very problematic regarding compatibility with many classic games.
- I would say just plug in 2+2 or 4+4 GB RAM. It gives you dual channel, is future proof, and doesn't cost much more.

Nice tip on the ram, even if I choose not to install it, it would not harm to have a spare 2GB stick.

I see... OpenGL...hmm, don't know much about this on such "newer cards", my son was born a little after the pentium4 debut and the pentium4-athlonXP wars, so everything after that is technologicaly in blank.
What would you say about a 5670 or a 6670?

There's very little difference between the 5670 and 6670 in terms of performance, the latter is faster but it is a marginal increase. There is certainly something to be said for going the nvidia route if you want better opengl performance and compatibility.

One thing I would watch out for is the extent to which the motherboard is compatible with Windows XP. Newer Intel based boards often lack floppy drive controllers and IDE controllers. My knowledge of Intel systems is not extensive, but I would also be wary of driver support. Make sure that whatever board you go for has the ability to work fully under XP. Intel are a lot happier to drop legacy support than AMD.

On a personal note I have a machine with a quad core phenom II, 4GB RAM, 512Mb HD4870, PhysX card and PCI-E X-Fi card that dual boots into XP and 7. I lost 768Mb of RAM due to 32bit OSes, but so far seem to have a system that offers highly capable performance in a broad range of gaming tasks - legacy to modern.

I found using an IDE DVD writer was slightly more compatible than using a SATA one, though I have no trouble with the SATA hard drives. I suspect SATA DVD drives may have more limited firmware (they tend to be cheap drives and probably don't have the same effort made that IDE drives had which were more expensive in their day).

I hope that helps in some way.

Very usefull thank you. Have been making some research regarding nVidia and I'm inclined to find a good 8800GT or 9800GT now.

I'm inclined to agree. I don't know how recent the games are that you want to play, but an 8800GT or better yet a GTS250 would be pretty awesome for most games as this seems to be a baseline modern developers target and stupidly quick for older games with broad compatibility. I say better yet for the GTS250 as if you can get the right one, then it uses less power than a 9800GTX+ but offers the same performance.

Let us know what you build, the geek in me is always interested.

From reading I understood AMD/ATI to be somewhat favorable compared to NVidia in regard to older windows games. And in fact; I have a 100% success rate with my AMD/ATI 4 and 6 series cards. But both times it was a real nightmare to find XP drivers without nags and bugs, and now actually combine one Main driver version with the openGL driver from another. I posted the versions in the vogons "release announcements" section: AMD catalyst thread (1st sticky).

I concur regarding AMD/ATI compatibility with older and XP games. Besides, it's [much] cheaper to put to together a Phenom dual-core/Radeon HD based system. As soon as my AMD 555BE/twin 5770's crossfire retire they go in my XP retro system.

Buy your RAM now, as soon as RAM gets superseded, the price goes up, e.g. DDR3 RAM is now cheaper than DDR2. Well, at least where I'm from.
I found this website a while ago, and has eerily similar specs to the system you are building. Might help.
http://ecogamer.co.uk/viewposts.php?viewtag=Test%20Systems

Same here 😉

2GB of RAM go like this:

ddr €50
ddr2 €30
ddr3 €10

that link, now I can stay a gamer and have global awareness 🤣

Got a sweet deal on a brand new , unopened 9800GT for €65 and so it is on its way 😀 , the first piece of the puzzle...

Id say the high end for 2008 ~ 2009 would be:

GTX295
i5 750
4GB DDR3
Socket 1156 not 1155, because 1156 was originally constructed to be high end.

gerwin wrote:

- For windows XP, stay with a 6 series Radeon, so there are at least some driver choices with proper OpenGL. AMD/ATI XP drivers are very problematic regarding compatibility with many classic games.

Can you please elaborate more on this? What do you mean by "classic"? If you mean pre-shader era (DX7 and previous) then NVIDIA will be similarly unreliable there. For OpenGL apps, starting from HD 4/5/6 series AMD is much improved (with newer drivers), though maybe not yet at NVIDIA level (reportedly fine in Rhino but still a lot slower in modo than NVIDIA equivalents).

But for D3D 9 games (which I guess is what the XP rig is for) I don't see anything wrong with the HD 7750. It's cheap, power-efficient, and plenty fast for this purpose. per Tom's graphics card chart, it is GTX 260~275 tier -- for 55W TDP and ~$100, maybe less if you can find a good deal.

Thank you archsan 😀 Those were my thoughts initially, but thanks to some opinions I became interested in the 8800GT history and it is decided, I find it to be a good balance overall.

But you are absolutly right , it is a XP rig, so for that kind of stuff I have older systems, like the one I'm writing this reply, with his humble Geforce 4 Ti4200. It is a Athlon XP at 1.6GHz replacing the dead Sempron untill I assembled the Future Retro PC Project. Or even my PIII 500MHz with Matrox Millenium G200 / G400 and Voodoo2 SLI.

archsan wrote:

gerwin wrote:

- For windows XP, stay with a 6 series Radeon, so there are at least some driver choices with proper OpenGL. AMD/ATI XP drivers are very problematic regarding compatibility with many classic games.

Can you please elaborate more on this? What do you mean by "classic"? If you mean pre-shader era (DX7 and previous) then NVIDIA will be similarly unreliable there. For OpenGL apps, starting from HD 4/5/6 series AMD is much improved (with newer drivers), though maybe not yet at NVIDIA level (reportedly fine in Rhino but still a lot slower in modo than NVIDIA equivalents).

I briefly checked my notes, I was facing these issues:
- Unreal Tournament '99 OpenGL various rendering problems.
- Il-2 Sturmovik FB with FSAA enabled: water rendering problems.
- BSOD when running X-wing Alliance.
- Occasionally Desktop garbled when exitting a game.
- A band of horizontal tearing when playing Mpeg and DVD video.
All of these problems came and went with different driver versions. And at least a 6 series card can use the v11-5 OpenGL driver file "atioglxx", AFAIK the last one that manages to run Il-2 properly with FSAA. Using v11-10 as the main driver version.

So I'm all set with a G860 and 2 sticks of 2GB DDR3, all for €86 with standard 2 year warranty, and the 9800GT it's on the way, for the HDD I'll have to use a spare 80GB Samsung SATA until I can afford an upgrade, and the IDE LG DVD-RW of the dead PC. And keeping the case.
I'll just have to decide what motherboard and psu to use, any sugestions for this configuration?

Intel Dual Core 3.0GHz G860
2 x 2GB Kingston 1333MHz DDR3
Geforce 9800GT

Nice project!

XP had such a long life (~ 10 years), so you will end up with a very capable machine and tons of games you can play 😀

Personally I find the Core 2 Duo THE XP platform, but that's really not that important.

i also recommend 4 GB of Ram (2 x 2 sticks) and definitely a Sound Blaster X-Fi. Arguably the "best" one you can get is the Titanium HD or the standard Titanium.

The 8800GT is an awesome card to represent this era. You will run into the odd driver issue here and there, for example I had a 9600GT and was playing Bioshock under XP and it was a documented driver issue with Nvidia (it would lag) and you needed to run an old driver.

There was a similar issue with BF2142. Basically at that point the focus was on Vista/W7 and XP was more and more neglected.

What games are you going to play?

As for mainboard, it doesn't matter much anymore as all the "guts" are in the CPU. Make sure it has all the connectors and plugs you need. Personally I will always go for Asrock, but Asus and Gigabyte are also very good. Nothing wrong with uATX, you can save a bit of cash.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

XP had such a long life (~ 10 years), so you will end up with a very capable machine and tons of games you can play 😀

... in my fleeting moments of rationality I have come to realize that with the ton of *unplayed* games I have accumulated from the glorious XP era, all I really need is a tricked-out XP rig...

Thank you, and yes this may not be the definitive XP rig, but having to put a PC together quickly I thought I could give it a try. If nothing else I learn something for future projects.

The games are the "classic" ones like GTA , Unreal, Max Payne and Mafia, Half-Life, Star Wars, Splinter Cell, Call of Duty, Medal of Honour, Wolfenstein, Command & Conquer, Far Cry, Jets n' Guns, Colin McRae, Doom3, Counter-Strike, Need for Speed, Battlefield, Crysis, Portal, Fallout, Mass Efect, Burnout, Batman, Street Fighter, Assassin's Creed , Bioshock , Borderlands... it realy is a enormous pool of fun, the games I did not play the last 10 years that I feel I'm missing something I guess... you may notice a pattern in my taste for games, I've always been like that since I've start playing in the very later 80's

gerwin wrote:

I briefly checked my notes, I was facing these issues: - Unreal Tournament '99 OpenGL various rendering problems. - Il-2 Sturmov […]
Show full quote

I briefly checked my notes, I was facing these issues:
- Unreal Tournament '99 OpenGL various rendering problems.
- Il-2 Sturmovik FB with FSAA enabled: water rendering problems.
- BSOD when running X-wing Alliance.
- Occasionally Desktop garbled when exitting a game.
- A band of horizontal tearing when playing Mpeg and DVD video.
All of these problems came and went with different driver versions. And at least a 6 series card can use the v11-5 OpenGL driver file "atioglxx", AFAIK the last one that manages to run Il-2 properly with FSAA. Using v11-10 as the main driver version.

I see, thanks. So,

- XWA comes with DX 5 I believe, so D3D 5.0
- UT'99 most likely uses OpenGL 1.1 or 1.2 at best
- IL2S FB is around DX 8.1 so OpenGL 1.3 or 1.4 at best -- definitely pre-2.0

note: I read some HD 7xx0 users are able to run IL2S 1946 (including FB I believe) after patching to 4.11. Actually the atioglxx.dll (temporary fix?) must be removed. It's up to ATI to make some much needed improvements in their OpenGL driver, and I doubt they're going to do it for older models first.

My point is, there is really no guarantee of better backward-compatibility between DX10+ cards (that's GF 8xx0/later for NV and HD 2x00/later for ATI). They've all gone to unified shader model (geometry/vertex/pixel). You'll have to go back to old cards with fixed function units to make sure the game works as the engine expected. And so far we already know the answer: yes, back to old Voodoos (king of Glide and D3D5/6) and old GeForces (king of DX7/8 with good D3D5/6 and OGL 1.x compatibility) again.

We can say that, before DX10 and OpenGL 3, both APIs are sort of a mess, so expect to see this kind of incompatibility problems until said versions become the minimum standard.

Filosofia wrote:

The games are the "classic" ones like GTA , Unreal, Max Payne and Mafia, Half-Life, Star Wars, Splinter Cell, Call of Duty, Medal of Honour, Wolfenstein, Command & Conquer, Far Cry, Jets n' Guns, Colin McRae, Doom3, Counter-Strike, Need for Speed, Battlefield, Crysis, Portal, Fallout, Mass Efect, Burnout, Batman, Street Fighter, Assassin's Creed , Bioshock , Borderlands... it realy is a enormous pool of fun, the games I did not play the last 10 years that I feel I'm missing something I guess... you may notice a pattern in my taste for games, I've always been like that since I've start playing in the very later 80's

Heaps of jems there 😀

Crysis for example, you can go all out with the latest i7 and GTX680. Such a wide range of games and requirements. Very hard to pick one system that does it all...