Well, how much period correct you want to go vs. how much performance you want/need to have ?

For GPU you could go 7800 GTX 512MB SLI (or 7900 GTX) for DX9c, but 8800 GTX class would be much faster in DX9c (also, on 7900 GTX you can't have AA enabled in some games).
On the other hand, there is X1950XTX or similar card (but no Crossfire there, since you have a nFore chipset).

I would go for 300GB VelociRaptor (1-st gen), or RaptorX (the one with plexi window).
RAID0 or not, a small 64GB SSD would be MUCH better (Intel SSDs support manual garbage collection on Win XP by using Intel SSD Tool).

Sound card Audigy 2 ZS is fine, but X-Fi Xtreme Music/Gamer are slightly newer (not to be confused with Xtreme Audio). X-Fi is 2005 tech FYI.

PSU... I highly recommend getting a modern one (as this is 10Y old tech).
Athlon64 are powered from 12V rail, so there shouldn't be a problem with overloaded 5V.

939 doesn't seem to be the easiest platform to go "period correct" with as it both had single core A64's and x2's and it could even fit Opterons and I think that throughout it's life it has seen 3-4 different GPU generations.

I suppose the latest period correct SLI setup would be a pair of 7900GTX 512's with the 8800's being more suited towards an AM2 platform with an Athlon X2 6400+ for example or rather Core2 platform as AMD's AM2 CPU offerings werent particularly interesting compared to Core2.

I might go with the X-Fi indeed, completely forgot that the 2ZS was 2003 tech. 😉

Graphics, biggest issue for me - GeForce 7900GTX SLI maybe?

Radeon X1950XTX.

So I have 3x S939 boards:

Abit AT8-32X
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
DFI LanParty NF4-SLI (not sure if deluxe or whatever)

Which would be the favored to build a system around? IIRC, the AT8-32X uses an ATI chipset, so it can't do SLI. Not sure if the NForce boards can do XFire.

ASUS for smooth sailing "from the box", DFI if you want to do a lot of tweaking with a lot of cursing. But! You can cheat and pick ATI chipset with GeForce 7950GX2/Quadro FX4500x2/GeForce 7900GTX DUO for SLI.

Getting decent GTX 7900s is getting harder while 7800s still go for peanuts mainly because almost every single one left in existence only has 256mb (still have yet to find a 512mb 7800 gtx in the wild) but you can find the 7950 gx2 for around $40 to 50 shipped that is before Europe explodes the prices. FX4500 x2 is simply a better 7900 GTX Duo but is a hair slower because of the quadro drivers in return for two extra dvi ports however you won't get two of these dual gpu cards in sli on that board unless you find hacked drivers. Hard to come by and people often want too much. 8800 GTX/Ultra is a better bet in the long run as they are more common and cheap (for now) but bottle necked by the rest of the system especially with two in sli. x1950xt in crossfire is sexy.

I've just bought a 7950GX2 but the seller is on holiday until thursday. They go for around €20.

For 8800's I'd rather get myself something like 680i SLI LGA775 board and add a QX6700/6800.

I run an FX60 as my daily computer. It was mentioned to be a good overclocker, but for stability, I found that 2.8 GHz is about max for my system. My system is not for gaming and I use an AGP-based AMD HD4350 graphics card in it.

I have exactly the same ambition - mine's going to be a 'Shit Hot For 2009' system, basically intended for DX10 gaming and therefore running Vista. It's an excellent era to be building a system from at the moment because prices are so low compared to their retail at the time.

I agree with agent_x007 that SSD is the way to go, at least on your system drive. And I don't know why no one ever recommends the Radeon HD4850 (or 4890 if you can afford it). Obviously in this case it's because of your motherboard, but I'm just saying because I recently picked up two HD4850x2 cards for a grand total of £30 via eBay. Literally all I now need is a Crossfire capable board that costs £20 or less (because that's my ceiling price for individual items - systems are a different matter). There are a lot about, but they're all selling for £40-50.

PSU - again, I picked up one cheaply on eBay after dong A LOT of research. Corsair's TX range are pretty solid and you won't want to go less than 750W for a dual-graphics system and a 125W CPU. Got my TX850W for £18 (postage was a little steep though). CPU-wise there are some deals to be had on the Phenom II X4 995 (Black Edition), which is actually better value than the Phenom II X6 1055T, which can go for twice as much.

Case-wise there's obviously too much choice so, as usual, I decide based on what's available and cheap. Picked up a Fractal Design Define R3 in white for £20 from a local seller and that's an amazingly versatile case - can be modified internally to prioritise cooling or acoustics. But then maybe you want something with a window...

Ultimately, my system will have cost me less than £200 in total, compared to an estimated cost of over £1,000 for the same system when it was new.

SSD's are the way to go but that would set me back a good €40-50 for a second hand 60-120GB one, whereas 1TB VelociRaptors go for the same amount of money.
Honestly I'd love dual RaptorX's in raid0.

PSU wise there are a few very nice options for not a lot of cash, the Corsair CX series being one of them. Cheap, reliable and quiet.
I've also seen a Tagan BZ 1300W for €75, might just jump on it. Together with DFI a real blast from the past brand.

The case must have a window and UV cathodes (It's a DFI LanParty in the end!).

Ultimately the total cost would look like this:
- Mainboard, RAM and CPU = €50
- PSU €30-50
- HDD/SSD ~€50
- 2x7950GX2 ~€50
- Black NZXT S340 Elite with UV cathodes ~€120

So around ~€300-350 total.

I know that the case is expensive but it's a thing that doesn't really get obsolete and can be reused for any project.

Radeon X1950 XTX is a very good choice for 2006 system, 8800 GTS/GTX is also good. I don't like GF7, they can't do AA+HDR, AF quality is poor, etc. And of course - SLI is stutterfest, at least when running AFR that is (which is 99% of the time).

I understand but I can't do CrossFire, only SLI. 8800 series is too new for S.939. For 8800's I'd rather go with Nforce 590 SLI based stuff.
I've just found a Thermaltake Tsunami Dream case in perfect condition and with a side window for peanuts, will fit nicely.

Remember this is all fun and "what if..." tinkering. for normal gaming I have an OC'ed Ryzen 1800X system. 😊
Anyway 8800's are dirt cheap too, they came to the point that 7000 series are actually more expensive.

Yes, CF is not possible on nForce... but this is hardly an issue. Getting X1950 XTX CF Master + the external cable is very difficult and even if you could find it, actual benefit of crossfire in games is minimal (same as GF7 SLI). Honestly I don't understand why everyone wants ro run GF7 SLI (let alone quad SLI)... it simply doesn't work - stuttering is so strong that single 7900 GTX provides better gameplay than 7950GX2.

Oh well, it's just for fun, to try it out.
Some spend their money on alcohol and smokes, I prefer buying old hardware 😈

Yes, CF is not possible on nForce

Actually yes - https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/970/radeon-x1950-pro-dual
Also crazy dual gpu cards on X1650. But this cards are hard to find.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

ASUS for smooth sailing "from the box", DFI if you want to do a lot of tweaking with a lot of cursing. But! You can cheat and pick ATI chipset with GeForce 7950GX2/Quadro FX4500x2/GeForce 7900GTX DUO for SLI.

Asus it is!

You guys using SSD's, are you using Windows 7? Don't SSD write performance slowly degrade without TRIM (which I thought Windows XP does not support)?

You can use SLC based SSD like Intel X25-E or its Kingston clone. They are quite cheap these days.

dexvx wrote:

The Serpent Rider wrote:

ASUS for smooth sailing "from the box", DFI if you want to do a lot of tweaking with a lot of cursing. But! You can cheat and pick ATI chipset with GeForce 7950GX2/Quadro FX4500x2/GeForce 7900GTX DUO for SLI.

Asus it is!

You guys using SSD's, are you using Windows 7? Don't SSD write performance slowly degrade without TRIM (which I thought Windows XP does not support)?

I have 3 systems (including an A8N-SLI) running SSDs on XP64. I use the ADATA SSD Toolbox on them, and I'm pretty sure that XP32 is also supported. It will let you manually run TRIM and doesn't actually care what brand of SSD you have. Mine are Micron and it doesn't complain.

It works for me on 2 of the 3 systems. On the 3rd I get an error where it says it can't detect any SATA drives. That's on an AMD790X/SB750 based motherboard, whose Windows AHCI drivers have always sucked as far as I can tell, and I can't get it to switch to IDE mode without blue screening (opposite the problem people usually have). I don't know if it would work if I had installed in IDE mode.

The 2 that work are an nForce4 A8N-SLI (IDE mode I think) and an Intel Q35 DQ35JOE (not sure what mode it's in). I would expect it to work on most (all?) systems that have good chipset drivers.

I haven't actually tried the one-click "OS Optimization" thing at the bottom, I decided to research some appropriate registry tweaks and applied them manually. I guess that button automates the popular ones.

Minor quirks - 1) Program takes a long time to open. 2) When you run TRIM, it gives a progress bar and "finished" prompt for the first partition, but then appears unresponsive while it does any subsequent partitions. After each subsequent partition you get another "finished" prompt but no indication of what it's doing in the meantime.

The utility is described and linked further down the page in this article:
http://wp.xin.at/archives/829
When I downloaded it, I scanned it at virustotal and it was clean, but you should still do the same.

---
Before installing XP, you should use gparted or some equivalent utility to set up properly aligned partition(s), since XP install will do it wrong. In gparted just select the "align to 1MB boundary" option. If you don't see that option then you need a newer version.
If you forget this step then I think it can also move the partitions after install, but this means overwriting the whole partition, so then you really want to be able to run TRIM afterward.

If you acquire a used drive, then it would be a good idea to 1) check for firmware updates - SSDs had a lot of growing pains (like my Microns which were famous for bricking themselves at ~3000hrs)
2) TRIM the whole drive before any other setup, since there might be allocated data outside the partition that you'll be creating for XP, and thus outside the address range that would be affected by XP's TRIM operation.
There are various ways of TRIMming an entire drive. The way I did it involved an existing linux system and some steps that were posted on superuser or one of it's countless sister sites. If nothing else, you can use "secure erase" even though that needlessly overwrites everything.

Even if you can't get XP to TRIM, you can mitigate the concern to an extent by first TRIMming everything (by whatever means), then partitioning only part of the drive for XP. Leaving say 25% of the drive's logical addresses as TRIMmed and never subsequently accessible by the OS means that there will always be at least 25% free space from the drive's point of view. This makes it easier for the drive to find "empty" (not containing valid data) flash cells whenever it needs to juggle data. This significantly reduces the write amplification issue that occurs with fully allocated/untrimmed drives. It's write amplification that brings SSDs to a crawl and can potentially kill them.

One of the differences from consumer and server-oriented SSDs is that the latter have more unused Flash held in reserve, for this very reason (sometimes those systems aren't able to run TRIM). You can emulate the same effect by just manually ensuring that part of the drive's accessible address range stays permanently TRIMmed and never actually accessed.

Some early SSD articles (maybe before TRIM was widely adopted) explored how much write amplification will occur with different degrees of "over-provisioning". As I recall 25% reserve was a pretty good compromise, but if you don't need that much space, then by all means allocate less.

Small update, i got the two 7950GX2's but somehow they won't run SLI, every time I enable SLI the screen goes black and flickers every second. I'm using Win XP 32Bit with the latest Nv 307.XX drivers.

The PCI-E lanes are set in BIOS to x8-x8, the additional floppy style power connector is also connected.