douglar wrote on 2026-06-16, 12:14:

That's a great card! {If you are lucky enough to find one or have a few hundred dollars to burn} […]
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appiah4 wrote on 2026-06-16, 09:41:

Mike_ wrote on 2026-06-13, 17:28:

What would be a decent GPU for an Athlon XP build, that still has decent DOS support?

GeForce FX 5900

That's a great card! {If you are lucky enough to find one or have a few hundred dollars to burn}

But it might be overkill unless you really need direct X 9.

If you are on a budget and can get by with Direct X7, an MX 4000 might be a good budget alternative. It's not the greatest 3d card, but decent for direct X 7 games and the DOS compatibility is high and the affordability is best.

Back in the day, I ran my Athlon XP 2100 with a Gefroce 4200ti and mainly played Direct X 8 games. That is also a decent card.

When I started playing direct X 9 games like Crysis and Halflife 2, I upgraded to an Athlon 64 and a Radeon 9800 because DOS compatibility wasn't so important to me at that time.

the geforce 4 MX 440 is also a decent card for dos gaming and ealry win 9x... i would not go for a mx4000 as they are poor.

NorsteinB wrote on 2026-06-17, 08:04:

I used a Barton on that board myself, the Epox 8KTA3+ has no official support for it, but does work with them anyway. Ran it at […]
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Mike_ wrote on 2026-06-17, 07:26:

I was actually thinking about using it as far into 00s as the CPU can manage, but it's true that 133MHz memory is probably the bottleneck. Although I'm using a barton CPU modded to run at 1.8GHz despite slower FSB, and the large cache might somewhat mitigate memory being so slow. In on itself, an athlon xp 2500+ should definitely be fine for 2003 games, and probably for most 2004 games as well.

I used a Barton on that board myself, the Epox 8KTA3+ has no official support for it, but does work with them anyway. Ran it at 1.8 GHz, too, since the board cannot set higher multipliers no matter what.
Did hardly make any difference, the RAM really is too much of a bottleneck. I'd say you're fine up to 2002. Initially this was a dual boot W98SE/XPSP3 system but I soon scrapped the XPSP3 partition and simply built my absolute 2003 dream machine with a higher clocked Barton and 9800 XT (pic related) and a Socket 939 system with an Athlon64 4000+ and X800XT.
There's not really a reason to make a specific 2003 machine I guess, I only did that because I loved the year.

I can easily make a 2003 machine... I have so many parts.... Can make both a athlon xp and a p4 machine from 2003. both high end...

the epox mobo u have is very good , but not for what u want. that is a perfect candidate for the ultimate win9x machine. also , expox boards are very hard to come by , so keep it...