Cheers for the words about what X58 and X79 represent, @GodsPetMonkey! Although it seems like a cool thing to experiment with, I've never tried overclocking, so ignorance just may turn out to be bliss in this case ... and the words in this thread about possible reliability issues due to taxing a …

Cheers to you for the post, @GodsPetMonkey! Bearing in mind that the PC I mentioned in the OP is the first PC I've built in over 20 years, would you mind elaborating on what an "X58" and an "X79" is? I'm assuming that they're Intel chipsets, but would you kindly give me an example of a good mobo …

You might want to look at X58 as a platform as well. Being the prosumer/workstation platform of it's time, motherboards are well built with good components, and you can find plenty of designed-for-workstation models from the well-known manufacturers, which given your use case is perfect fit really. …

My absolute end of the line, overkill XP machine is: CPU: Xeon E5-1680 v2 (set to 4.0GHz on all 8 cores, though plenty powerful enough at stock for anything XP) Mobo: ASUS Rampage IV (X79 chipset, LGA 2011) RAM: 32GB DDR3 2400MHz (obviously only 4GB usable in XP 32-bit) GPU: Geforce GTX 980 ( …

Thrown in some other cards like savage 2000 and stuff like that to see if anyone else besides 3dfx can render the game properly. Sounds likes a project for collector since most people don't have all the cards. I have a few cards, and as a Thief fan I did do some testing for my own benefit some time …