There's no need to limit yourself to just 4GB RAM. Having more than that will benefit Win7 and won't do any harm to WinXP.

In terms of the GPU, there are official WinXP drivers for GTX 970 and 980 cards as well. See this thread on MSFN. Unofficially, using modded drivers, you can even go up to Titan X under WinXP. As far as I know, there aren't any compatibility issues with GTX 9xx cards that you wouldn't already encounter with a GTX 660. And you do want the most powerful hardware possible if you plan on running demanding titles from the late 2000s and early 2010s, especially if you're targeting 1080p at 60 FPS.

Ivy Bridge will work for XP. I use a 3770k in my own XP build.

You could go faster on the GPU, especially if you're looking to run Windows 7. I use a 980 Ti in my XP build and it works with modified the .INF files for the nVidia drivers. It's about as fast a GPU as will run under XP.

For RAM, I'd go with at least 8GB or even 16GB for Windows 7.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-14, 18:18:

I am thinking about using an ivy bridge i5 CPU, 4GB ram, a GTX 660 and an X-Fi. Is there anything that needs to be considered?

Windows XP has always run a tad slow on the PCIe systems I've installed it on - my Pentium III desktop usually boots faster than my Core 2 Duo laptop. The raw power of the Ivy Bridge i5 might be able to offset this, however.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-14, 18:16:

And is there any point in having a sound card at all, if onboard sound is present?

The quality of onboard audio is hit-and-miss - it can sound great or make for a miserable experience. I have a Pentium III desktop with solid onboard audio and have used a Haswell laptop with terrible sound, so age has nothing to do with it.

Yeah, definitively avoid on-board audio solutions for WinXP gaming. Beside their questionable sound quality, most of those top out at EAX 2.0 and even that is often handled poorly. Also, note that later Windows versions (Vista and onward) no longer support EAX natively. For that reason, EAX remains one of the highlights of a good WinXP gaming system. It's best experienced with a nice X-Fi sound card, as those have hardware support for EAX 5.0 and all the previous versions as well.

Proper EAX support can make a noticeable difference in stealth games like Thief: Deadly Shadows and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Also, many first-person shooters from that time such as Doom 3, Prey and Battlefield 2 use EAX for improving positional audio, making it easier to detect opponents by sound. More info on EAX can be found in this thread.

OK, many thanks for your comments:

So it is going to be an Ivy CPU/mobo combi. If excessive ram isn't an issue for XP, I will stick in as much as I have. If the board has 4 sockets, I can hit 16GB. Atm, I am favoring the ASrock Z77 Pro4, which I own in both form factors.

I do have one GTX 960 4GB, which I would consider good enough if it enjoys full xp support. Are there any issues that I would avoid by going down to a GTX460?

From what you guys write, my x-fi titanium pci-e would be a good choice for the audio job? I could also just go directly from GTX960 int0 5.1 AV Receiver. That would be inferior to X-Fi? Or should I go X-Fi for headphones and Nvidia for 'Full Surround Hifi System'? (in the past, I went optical into a non HDMI AV, with DTS encoding)

I am not clear on the form factor yet. With the specifics outlined in this thread, I would only need 2 PCIe ports for VGA and Audio. No other (PCI) cards need to be installed? If this holds true, µATX seems to be a viable solution.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-15, 10:03:

From what you guys write, my x-fi titanium pci-e would be a good choice for the audio job? I could also just go directly from GTX960 int0 5.1 AV Receiver. That would be inferior to X-Fi? Or should I go X-Fi for headphones and Nvidia for 'Full Surround Hifi System'? (in the past, I went optical into a non HDMI AV, with DTS encoding)

I'm not sure if using HDMI for audio output would nullify the EAX capabilities of the X-Fi, since the GPU is technically considered as a separate audio device. For my part, I'm using an analog 5.1 surround speaker system plugged directly into my X-Fi Titanium which works without any issues.

In your case, I think it *might* be possible to get surround by hooking up the Optical Out of your X-Fi to the Optical In of your AV receiver (assuming it has that input). However, I vaguely remember that Creative started getting stingy with their Dolby license around this time. Not sure if it will work out of the box, or if that functionality requires online activation of some sort. Maybe someone else can clarify this.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-06-15, 10:33:

For my part, I'm using an analog 5.1 surround speaker system plugged directly into my X-Fi Titanium which works without any issues.

Mine is a full size audio hifi speaker system. Main Speakers are over a meter in height. Ideally, I would want to use this again or go on headphones. For tinkering, I hook the main audio out cable to a mobile speaker (blutooth type with extra input jack, nice to have on hand)

In your case, I think it *might* be possible to get surround by hooking up the Optical Out of your X-Fi to the Optical In of your AV receiver (assuming it has that input). However, I vaguely remember that Creative started getting stingy with their Dolby license around this time. Not sure if it will work out of the box, or if that functionality requires online activation of some sort. Maybe someone else can clarify this.

Yes, this is possible and I did that for years. I first owned a PCI version of the x-fi, which required me to buy the DD and DTS encoding from creative for a small amount (~5$). Some driver/software download, and you had the funtionality. With the X-Fi Titanium (Pci-e), it is already implemented. Of course, going optical multi-channel via DD or DTS means heavy compression. Which is OK with games but no so much with music. Since my old AV died and I got a new HDMI AV, I use HDMI for audio and took the X-Fi out. I was assuming that todays games will take care of positional audio themselves and just dump it into all the 5 channels the nvidia directs onward.

As the new AV-receiver offers several HDMI in, connecting another HDMI capable machine via another HDMI-in would make some sense to me. I could switch everything with one button on the AV. But of course I can also assign the optical in to that button and go X-Fi. I am no longer using that xp-build for music. Headphones would be interesting however.

The X-Fi Titanium HD lacks Windows XP drivers.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-06-17, 07:32:

The X-Fi Titanium HD lacks Windows XP drivers.

This is true.

But the OP and I were discussing the regular (non-HD) X-Fi Titanium PCIe (SB0880) i.e. the previous generation. That one does have WinXP drivers.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-06-17, 07:32:

The X-Fi Titanium HD lacks Windows XP drivers.

The driver CD says XP and Vista. So I guess I don't have the HD version. But thanks for pointing out that possibility.
And yes, it is the SB0880.

Short answer is an Ivy-Bridge i5, GTX960 and an X-Fi is going to make for a pretty-much-as-good-as-it-gets overkill XP machine, and a very good Win7 experience, with everything just working out of the box.

Longer answer is that Ivy-Bridge with the Z77 chipset (and Ivy-Bridge-E with X79) is the last fully supported, everything is meant to work and just does platform for XP. Haswell/Z87 is partially supported (and is pretty easy to get working), and platforms beyond will work too, with increasing effort on your part, but Ivy-Bridge is plenty overkill, plenty cheap and having everything just work as intended makes life much easier all round. If you are willing to pay a premium, X79 and Ivy-Bridge-E will edge out anything Z77 (HEDT levels of cache and quad channel memory give it a small, but nice, bump), but that comes at a cost dollars wise. The X58 platform is also a good contender, but still comes in more expensive than Z77 and I don’t think you notice any real advantage from it.

For RAM, 32-bit XP isn’t going to care how much you have as long as it is at least 4GB. Win7 will love you for 16GB (or more if you are keen).

GPU wise, GTX 960 is the latest fully supported GPU for XP. The GTX 970 and 980 are fully supported too, but only with the 344.11 drivers. I’ve never had an issue with a GTX 980 on XP using these drivers, but if you want to use the most recent Nvidia drivers the 960 is the easiest way to go. Beyond that, all of Maxwell up to and including the GTX 980ti and original Titan X will work with a simple driver inf mod. The 980ti tend to have better coolers and clock better in stock configuration than the Titan X, so will likely be the best you can get for any XP overkill machine - technically it will be beaten by a Titan X with more exotic cooling and an overclock, but only you can know if you want to try to hunt down a compatible water block and build a custom water cooling loop. A 980ti is pretty beefy for Win7, but there are Win7 drivers for everything up to the RTX 3090. If the 980ti will be overkill enough for 7 will come down to how far you push your Win7 experience.

If for some reason you are keen on a Titan X, just make sure you get the Maxwell Titan X. There was another Titan X but it is Pascal (think 1080ti), and there are no XP drivers for it. Thanks to nvidia for naming two cards Titan X despite them being completely different.

If you are a ATI/AMD person, the best you can get for XP is an R9 280x (note the R9 290/290x won’t work in XP!). Performance wise that’s about a GTX 580 to 680 equivalent, well short of a 980ti. A GTX 960 probably isn’t much ahead performance wise, but power consumption and heat will be a lot lower.

An X-Fi for XP is a no brainer. That gives you support for everything EAX, and hardware accelerated audio including EAX is a big reason to play XP era games on XP.

GodsPetMonkey wrote on 2024-06-17, 10:21:

Win7 will love you for 16GB (or more if you are keen).

What software needs 16 GiB of RAM on Windows 7?

GemCookie wrote on 2024-06-17, 11:52:

What software needs 16 GiB of RAM on Windows 7?

A web-browser =P

GemCookie wrote on 2024-06-17, 11:52:

GodsPetMonkey wrote on 2024-06-17, 10:21:

Win7 will love you for 16GB (or more if you are keen).

What software needs 16 GiB of RAM on Windows 7?

Jedi: Fallen Order likes lots of RAM.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-06-17, 11:52:

What software needs 16 GiB of RAM on Windows 7?

Late 7-era games can certainly benefit from the extra headroom, and 7’s memory management is pretty good, so it’ll make use of it if you go overkill.

Personally I like the ARMA games, they love RAM, especially when you load them up with mods (which is a given). Heavily modded Skyrim also chews it up, and that’s not an out-there use case. Of course, Skyrim is fine on a modern Win10/11 PC too, if that’s your thing, but given how cheap DDR3 is, there’s no reason to go 4*4GB or 2*8GB no matter what you are playing. If you were on a DDR2 platform, 8GB makes more sense, but anything DDR2 isn’t going to push into Win7 overkill territory.

There isn’t much need for a Win7 dedicated machine yet, but given the hardware is both common and cheap, you may as well grab the overkill parts now. Added bonus is that it is also XP compatible!

GodsPetMonkey wrote on 2024-06-18, 01:51:

There isn’t much need for a Win7 dedicated machine yet, but given the hardware is both common and cheap, you may as well grab the overkill parts now. Added bonus is that it is also XP compatible!

Well, the idea is that win 10 and 11 have dropped the support of disc based copy protection. It may be possible to patch it back in somehow, but I don't want to repeat this step every few years with each new version of windows while compromising security. I simply want to have a machine where I can run stuff out of the box. I don't do this for "period correctness" but for trouble free operation. If it happens to run on win11, I won't bother to put it on an older machine.

And at the moment, it really costs me nothing, as there is a lot of retired stuff still in the house. In a way, I am rather planning what to toss or sell of the more recent stuff. Can't keep it all. I can even secure a GTX970 for free, as my son got mine when I retired it. And he kept it as a spare to his current card. The point of this thread is to find out what to keep to have an optimized XP/win7 machine and a full set of essential spare parts.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-18, 05:12:

And at the moment, it really costs me nothing, as there is a lot of retired stuff still in the house. In a way, I am rather planning what to toss or sell of the more recent stuff. Can't keep it all. I can even secure a GTX970 for free, as my son got mine when I retired it. And he kept it as a spare to his current card. The point of this thread is to find out what to keep to have an optimized XP/win7 machine and a full set of essential spare parts.

There are some games better run on 7 (copy protection issues being case in point!), and I agree it’s the right time to start thinking about it as compatible hardware is now cheap and plentiful. Not much focus here yet on Win7 retro platforms, but I guess that makes it even more sensible to be thinking about it now… beat the rush! Ivy-Bridge systems sit in a wonderful sweet spot servicing both XP and 7, and I can well see the demand for them going up as people start building overkill retro systems for XP and beyond.

Fortunately XP was so long in the tooth, and Intel & AMD both cut support for Win7 pretty early to help MS avoid a repeat that dual purpose machines like the one you are building are pretty trivial to assemble. Just a shame the closeness in CPU support for XP and 7 wasn’t repeated for GPUs. There are some big performance leaps for the 1080ti to RTX 30 series that Win7 supports, while XP is limited to Maxwell at best. How much that matters may depend on the games you play and monitor your driving.