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First post, by WildW

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I'm rearranging my computers a little and will be keeping a dedicated Windows XP machine set up. I had been using an Athlon 64 machine to dual boot XP and 98SE, but I find that my Pentium 3 system is fine for everything I play pre-Windows-XP.

My XP machine now is Core2Duo and PCI Express based. It's in a desktop format case that doesn't deal well with hot graphics cards and the whole thing is otherwise pretty quiet so I'd like to keep it that way. I first tried a Radeon 5770 I already had, but fans started to spin up rather noisily and it was getting too hot in there for my liking. Right now I have a passive Radeon 5450 in there instead but I would like a little more power to deal with a few more demanding titles like Oblivion at the heady heights of 1024x768.

Does anyone know of any issues with more recent XP-supported graphics cards and early XP games? Should I just buy a brand new card like a Geforce GT 710 or 730, or is there a benefit to an older generation card that might better fit my power budget, like maybe a Radeon 5670? I'm not too worried about period correctness, I just want to be able to run things well.

Reply 1 of 33, by BeginnerGuy

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5770 would be nice but the turbine fans on them is ridiculous, I have two of them myself.

I'm also doing the same thing as you with a C2D machine in a Dell Studio, I think I'm quite set on getting a used 750 Ti and upgrading to a Q8400 (they go stupid cheap now, if you can deal with 95 watts).. Haven't heard any compatibility issues on any XP games with the 750 and they can run basically every game I care to play at a maxed out 60fps.

In short.. I vote 750 Ti unless it's too expensive or somebody has some game breaking issue to report 😎

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Reply 2 of 33, by dr_st

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Mid-to-high-range graphics cards (middle digit 5-6 for nVidia, 6-7 for ATI) usually have some compact editions, with quiet fans, and they are also cool-running and are not power-hungry. You don't need a passively cooled card; plenty of actively-cooled cards which are still very quiet. On my Vista desktop, I went from a TwinTech 9600GT to a Zotac GTX660, and both of these cards have always been dead silent (until the fan bearing on 9600GT went and the fan became noisy). These are just examples. If you read reviews of mid-range video cards of your chosen generation, you will find multiple suggestions for compact and quiet cards; then it's a matter of browsing through eBay or your local stocks to see what you can find.

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Reply 3 of 33, by clueless1

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I use a GTX 750Ti and couldn't be happier. Cool, quiet, more than fast enough for anything XP is capable of playing, and no compatibility issues so far.

edit: the system this is in uses a Core2 Quad 2.67Ghz. I've played everything from RtCW to Crysis. No issues.

Last edited by clueless1 on 2017-12-17, 18:04. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 4 of 33, by Shagittarius

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I've got a GTX580 in my C2D 8600 currently, though it's bottle necked in a lot of games / benchmarks barely performing better than a GTX280. I suppose if I move up to a C2quad I could make some of the benchmarks go faster but it wouldn't do anything to help the games. GTX280s can currently be had all over the place on ebay for 20$ , when I had the 280 in my machine it was quiet.

I've been considering making the move to an i7-920 which should produce better results paired with the GTX580 but I don't think it's really necessary for running anything I can't run on my modern machine.

Reply 5 of 33, by Jo22

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It's always the old ATI vs. nVidia story *sigh*. 🙁 Why no S3 cards, for example ?
Back in the XP days we stll had the ability to choose.. I had one in late 2000 to early 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Chrome

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Reply 6 of 33, by dr_st

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Jo22 wrote:

Why no S3 cards, for example ?

Well, how did their performance and driver support compared to "the big two"?

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Reply 7 of 33, by BeginnerGuy

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Jo22 wrote:

It's always the old ATI vs. nVidia story *sigh*. 🙁 Why no S3 cards, for example ?
Back in the XP days we stll had the ability to choose.. I had one in late 2000 to early 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Chrome

I would gladly suggest them, but what do they have that will beat or come close to 5770 performance with low power consumption? It's hard enough to even find an s3 chrome series card on ebay in the US and WildW wants more power (and less power at the same time!)... so the 750 Ti was an obvious thought 😎

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Reply 8 of 33, by DX7_EP

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Joining the bandwagon, I also use a GTX 750Ti with my C2Q Q8300-equipped XP unit. It works quite well there with everything I have tested so far, all whilst being cool, quiet, and power efficient. Other options might include the R7 2xx series of cards, which have shown themselves (courtesy of Phil's R7 240 videos) to be pretty good for that purpose too.

For more performance with good power efficiency, I'd also consider the GTX 950 - particularly a few models that don't have a 6-pin connector (alas I don't recall model numbers, but know they were sold at times). It is more recent, but it still has XP support in the drivers for some reason. They might be a tad pricey though, and considering the higher chances of a CPU bottleneck, I think they're better used in a hybrid XP/Win7+ machine with newer CPUs and chipsets.

EDIT: Added R7 series of cards as option, removed GTX 960 amidst typical costs and concerns over TDP (120W vs 108W of OP's HD5770), and adjusted text blurb

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Reply 9 of 33, by FFXIhealer

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Man, I always find discussions like this so weird to me. The most powerful graphics card I ever used with Windows XP was a GeForce "Go" 7800 GTX in my Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop and it has a single-core Pentium M at 2.1 GHz. It never had a problem gaming even at 1920 x 1200 (the laptop's native 17" LCD display resolution). My only experience with the Core 2 line was a Core 2 Duo at 2.53GHz and it had Vista with a GeForce 8400 GS, as it was only for my mother to use and not built for gaming. The next computer I had was a full-blown Core i7-860 with dual GTX 480s in SLI running under Windows 7.
I guess I just never saw the need for a dual-core with Windows XP. And I seem to have wildly skipped entire graphics card generations. My history looks like skipping on the rain-slick sidewalk.
Diamond Stealth II G460 (Intel i740 chip) (1999) -> ATI Radeon 7500 (2002) -> ATI Radeon 9550 (upgrade 2004) -> GeForce 7800 GTX (2006) -> GTX 480 SLI (2010) -> GTX 980ti (2015).

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Reply 11 of 33, by BeginnerGuy

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FFXIhealer wrote:

Man, I always find discussions like this so weird to me. The most powerful graphics card I ever used with Windows XP was a GeForce "Go" 7800 GTX in my Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop and it has a single-core Pentium M at 2.1 GHz. It never had a problem gaming even at 1920 x 1200 (the laptop's native 17" LCD display resolution). My only experience with the Core 2 line was a Core 2 Duo at 2.53GHz and it had Vista with a GeForce 8400 GS, as it was only for my mother to use and not built for gaming. The next computer I had was a full-blown Core i7-860 with dual GTX 480s in SLI running under Windows 7.
I guess I just never saw the need for a dual-core with Windows XP. And I seem to have wildly skipped entire graphics card generations. My history looks like skipping on the rain-slick sidewalk.
Diamond Stealth II G460 (Intel i740 chip) (1999) -> ATI Radeon 7500 (2002) -> ATI Radeon 9550 (upgrade 2004) -> GeForce 7800 GTX (2006) -> GTX 480 SLI (2010) -> GTX 980ti (2015).

Some people upgraded sooner than others I suppose. My pcs were always home built so buying another OS was a huge addition to the cost, and i didnt "need" anything Xp couldn't do (i still dont for the most part) so I ran XP up until around 2011 when I had a phenom ii x4 955BE with crossfire hd5770s, then finally upgraded to win7.

I just liked the simplicity of XP and felt no need tp upgrade. I think it was wanting to see directx 10 that finally got me to buy win 7

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Reply 12 of 33, by FFXIhealer

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DirectX 11 was really where I think mainstream gaming finally hit a sweet spot recently. I haven't seen much of DX12 to make any kind of judgement call on it. Doom (2016) runs it, but it also runs Vulcan, which I use on that game. I really like Windows 10, unlike a lot of haters on-line. I just locked it down after the initial install and I'm pretty good.

Does having a dual-core really help with Windows XP? The way I saw it, multi-core CPUs were pretty much MANDATORY for Windows Vista and later systems. I have a Samsung N150 netbook with a 1.6GHz Atom CPU (single-core with Hyperthreading) and it ran both Windows 7 and now Windows 10 pretty slowly. I think that these new OSs just have so much going on in terms of graphics power that the weaker processor and single-core status make it difficult. Hell, I stuck a SNES emulator on it and you'd think that at 1.6GHz it would run buttery smooth. Nope. I get skipped framerates. Why the hell did the emulator work so well on my old 350MHz Pentium II Windows 98 system, but suck so bad on a 1.6GHz processor? I think the OS (Windows 10) won't stop doing sh** in the background. Maybe I'm not using the right version of the emulator.

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Reply 13 of 33, by BeginnerGuy

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FFXIhealer wrote:

Does having a dual-core really help with Windows XP? The way I saw it, multi-core CPUs were pretty much MANDATORY for Windows Vista and later systems.

I would say with SP3 they provide a nice boost. XP was really bogged down with that service pack IMO and it felt absolutely nice on my 4 core Phenom with 4GB ddr3.

Anyway, returns may be diminishing on the OS itself but the benefit is massive when you want to play games.. I was still using XP as my primary OS for games like Fallout 3, Sacred 2, Borderlands, and so forth. Borderlands clobbered the Athlon 64 X2 I was running before the Phenom, that's for sure 🤣

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Reply 14 of 33, by WildW

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Thanks guys. I got a good deal on a brand new GT730 on Amazon so I went with that. Was less than half the price I could find a 750TI for, new or used, so I'm happy. I'm only driving 1024x768 so it ought to be powerful enough and I won't worry about fan noise since it doesn't have one.

Reply 15 of 33, by BeginnerGuy

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WildW wrote:

Thanks guys. I got a good deal on a brand new GT730 on Amazon so I went with that. Was less than half the price I could find a 750TI for, new or used, so I'm happy. I'm only driving 1024x768 so it ought to be powerful enough and I won't worry about fan noise since it doesn't have one.

No fan? Can you show me the model you got? I may want that too 🤣

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Reply 17 of 33, by buckeye

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clueless1 wrote:

I use a GTX 750Ti and couldn't be happier. Cool, quiet, more than fast enough for anything XP is capable of playing, and no compatibility issues so far.

edit: the system this is in uses a Core2 Quad 2.67Ghz. I've played everything from RtCW to Crysis. No issues.

Would the 750Ti work with XP SP2/directX9? Currently have a GF 7950GT with a Duo Core 2 3ghz and it struggles in Crysis, maybe the 750Ti would help it out some I don't know.

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Reply 18 of 33, by schmatzler

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WildW wrote:

Thanks guys. I got a good deal on a brand new GT730 on Amazon so I went with that. Was less than half the price I could find a 750TI for, new or used, so I'm happy. I'm only driving 1024x768 so it ought to be powerful enough and I won't worry about fan noise since it doesn't have one.

The GT730 is a great card, I use it as a cheap external GPU for my notebook.
I have the version from Gigabyte with higher clock speeds and GDDR5 memory. It can run a lot of games, but has fallen behind with the latest AAA titles.

Time to upgrade to the GT1030, that should bring me back to business. 😎

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Reply 19 of 33, by Bobolaf

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buckeye wrote:

Currently have a GF 7950GT with a Duo Core 2 3ghz and it struggles in Crysis, maybe the 750Ti would help it out some I don't know.

The GeForce 750 TI is many times faster than a 7950GT so you should see good gains not only in fps at your current settings but you should be able to turn a few of the hardware based eye candy on with out seeing a significant performance hit.