You don't need something as new as the 950 but its a good idea.
as a comparison I've got a pair of GTX590's in my XP build. complete waste as SLI is disabled in XP but does mean I can run any game with full details and all the driver enhancements turned up for maximum quality and still the cards are underutilized.
Where as my 6800 Ultra or 7950 GT2's both struggle once you start enabling AA etc in the drivers.

So if you can get the GTX950 at a good price I'd say go for it. Overpowered is good. less load mans less heat and power draw plus plenty of headroom to enable all those driver enhancements.

Thank you for the tip, I could get the 950 for less than 60 eur, but if it is really overpowered it's going to be useless...
I agree about less heat and power draw, that's why I'm going to pick a card that doesn't require any 6 or 8 pin power connector.
Also ATI\amd would be fine as well...

A post from back in 2016 (when XP was finally end of life) came to a bit of a conclusion that the GTX 285 was the best price vs performance card for XP.
So if you look for something around that benchmark as a minimum as really I doubt you'll have trouble finding something more powerful for a good price.

I'm not familiar enough with ATI to make good educated recommendations on that side of the camp.

I built a similar system, a few days ago. I have the A8N SLI Premium with an Opteron 180 (like a X2 4800+) and i combined it with two 9800GT in SLI. In most cases the CPU is the limiting factor, also with activated AA and AF.
The 9800GT (or 8800GT - it is the same!) is very cheap on ebay at moment.

Maybe it is relevant to you: On my Board i had to replace seven of 820uF and two of 1500uF (china-) caps before bringing it to work reliable.

PC-Engineer wrote:

I built a similar system, a few days ago. I have the A8N SLI Premium with an Opteron 180 (like a X2 4800+) and i combined it with two 9800GT in SLI. In most cases the CPU is the limiting factor, also with activated AA and AF.
The 9800GT (or 8800GT - it is the same!) is very cheap on ebay at moment.

Maybe it is relevant to you: On my Board i had to replace seven of 820uF and two of 1500uF (china-) caps before bringing it to work reliable.

Wow, the opteron 180 was the cpu I had back in time with the DFI, good catch!
As far as I know the system was sold as perfectly working but I will check the caps just to be sure.

The only thing i'm not sure is about the sli, I doubt it will be power efficient, also I had the 8800 back in time and despite being very thin it was hot like hell.

I'd just stick a Radeon X1950OPRO in there and enjoy. If you don't mind overkill, use a Radeon HD4850 (but I would rather to use that for an AM2+ system instead..)

The 8800GT SLI is definitely not as energy efficient, like the GTX950. The SLI gives you appr. a performance plus of 80% if the CPU is able to feed it. My system is relavively quiet with. And i drive it with an Enermax EG365 with 353W nominal power to the system, with very good power on the 12V rail (26A/312W). With an assumed efficiency of 80% it means a power of 440W from the grid.
In desktop idle it needs 170W (grid). The observed max peak is 335W (grid). Until now it is rock stable. I dont know your price per kWh, but maybe you can calculate how much time you need to cover the lower price with the higher efficiency.

I never had a SLI system before. And it is nice to have one 😉

Sorry for the bump, so the Nvidia series 9 wasn't a viable option, since it lacks the windows xp drivers.

I still didn't find the right card for this system (in the meantime the price of video cards went insane), I would go for a 750 ti, what about the ati\amd?

I still would like to get something power efficient.

What games are you looking to play up to?

The 750 ti is a great power-efficient card that can run most XP-era games maxed. But one thing to be concerned with is driver overhead. An Athlon X2 isn't exactly a powerhouse. And drivers for later video cards have many more features, but your old CPU has much less processing power so it's possible you'll have lower performance with a 750 ti than you would with an older and slower card.

Since you aren't concerned with period correctness, you could give the 750 ti a try. If you find it's not keeping up, switch to an XP end of life Core2, or last supported Sandy/Ivybridge i3/5. Both are very inexpensive, with the i-series being in great supply from old office computers. You might need to use a Molex -> PCIe power adapter, but the 750 ti shouldn't have problems running with even the low spec PSUs included in those office machines.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2021-08-01, 21:15:

Sorry for the bump, so the Nvidia series 9 wasn't a viable option, since it lacks the windows xp drivers.

I still didn't find the right card for this system (in the meantime the price of video cards went insane), I would go for a 750 ti, what about the ati\amd?

I still would like to get something power efficient.

If you look for an XP driver for a 900 series, it says no, But the 368.81 for the GTX 750 also lists GTX 950 / 960 as supported
https://www.nvidia.co.uk/Download/driverResul … px/105193/en-uk

As for AMD, looks like XP drivers are available for SOME R9/R7/R5 models.....
R9 270 but not 280, R7 260 & 260X but not 265 .. and not the 300 series at all

Up to HD7970 on the AMD front. Not sure about the newer remakes up to the R9 280X

I have a 939 SLI board with an X2-4600, though mine is a weirdy BFG that teh interwebs seems to have forgotten about for the moment. I'll probably end up sticking my pair of 9600GTs in it as "close enough" ... though I also have pairs of Radeon 4850, 5850, 6850, 6870 but at least 3 of those belong better in AM2 or late 775 boards, though my lastest fastest will prolly get an R9 in it instead. Annoyingly my gpu range seems to have a hole in it from about 2003 to 2008ish, apart from a sprinkle of low low end.

I'd get something like the 7900GTO. Fast for XP, and period correct with your Athlon X2, has no bump mapping issues the more modern GPUS might have and the GF7 was fairly energy efficient.

I don't care to be period correct, I'm looking to be power efficient and retrocompatible, but as SScorpio mentioned the driver overhead could be a problem.

Thank you Matth79, for the clarification

So I'd say: gtx 750(ti) or 950 if I go with nvidia, while with amd\ati I'd say R7 260x?

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-08-02, 06:25:

I'd get something like the 7900GTO. Fast for XP, and period correct with your Athlon X2, has no bump mapping issues the more modern GPUS might have and the GF7 was fairly energy efficient.

GeForce 7 might not have bump mapping issues but sure has bump issues, as does GF8 and contemporary nForces.

A GTX260 might be a nice card, but it drinks power like it's trying to forget something.
750Ti or R7 260 are also good, but I fear they are too good. In the current crazy GPU market you'll end up paying way too much for such a card.

Something a bit older, like a 6770, 7770 or GTX 560?

HD5450/6450/7450 and HD4650 use minimal power, as does 7300GT 9400GT 430GT 440GT all single slot card with no additional power connector. They're all like quadruple the 6600 at least.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-08-02, 21:09:

HD5450/6450/7450 and HD4650 use minimal power, as does 7300GT 9400GT 430GT 440GT all single slot card with no additional power connector. They're all like quadruple the 6600 at least.

Nope, the 7300GT is around 50% faster than the regular 6600 and performs about the same as the 6600GT. Even the 9400GT is below 4x performance in real gaming. It's closer to 3-3.5x.