That is an awesome system! I would only have changed out the video card (for my own purposes though) to an Nvidia 6800 Ultra.
As for the Raptors, I never used them myself, but a few friends did and reported exelent quality, so hopefully there will be no problem there. 😀
I doubt you will have problems running any games from that era and probably will easily handle many more recent games at lower settings.

I did consider a 6800 (I have an ASUS 6800 GT AGP) but the x1950 pro is the top card from the era I'm trying to build the system for. The only edge the 6800 would have is in Doom 3, Quake 4 and Riddick - but I play these games on my main PC anyways (they are all still games I play regularly). So the x1950 won it. 20,000 vs 15,500 (in 3dMark 03) respectively.

😁

Pics, man! We want some pics!

Yeah, I have to agree, good call on going with the X1950. The only pain about them is the AGP versions can really suck the life out of a power supply less then 550 watts. When you get your harddrives in, run Seagate Seatools, and if need be, HDD Regenerator if you have any bad sectors Seatools cant fix.

Whats the point? Really, does your main rig not able to play some games? That this thing does? It is not even a Windows 9X machine!

Cyberdyne wrote:

Whats the point? Really, does your main rig not able to play some games? That this thing does? It is not even a Windows 9X machine!

If his main rig is a 64bit system, then yes, it can play some games that his main rig can't. One of the major reasons I built a tulatin rig was for the small handful of 32 bit games that I couldn't get to work easily in Win7 64.

Other than that, it's just awesome to build computers. I think it was Tetrium that said "electric legos". That's the way I view them anyway, as a hobby.

Cyberdyne wrote:

Whats the point? Really, does your main rig not able to play some games? That this thing does? It is not even a Windows 9X machine!

It's a period machine using the most powerful parts available for a particular time frame.

nemesis wrote:

That is an awesome system! I would only have changed out the video card (for my own purposes though) to an Nvidia 6800 Ultra.
As for the Raptors, I never used them myself, but a few friends did and reported exelent quality, so hopefully there will be no problem there. 😀
I doubt you will have problems running any games from that era and probably will easily handle many more recent games at lower settings.

7950 GT AGP was more in the time period of the x1950.

Very nice rig, but some pics would be nice

nemesis wrote:

I think it was Tetrium that said "electric legos". That's the way I view them anyway, as a hobby.

Yup, that was me, and it's true 😁

So far I've had few programs not run on 7 but run on XP (mainly a couple benchmark programs if memory serves me right).

Cyberdyne wrote:

Whats the point? Really, does your main rig not able to play some games? That this thing does? It is not even a Windows 9X machine!

There are actually games that wont run in Windows 98/ME, nor Vista or Win 7, so having a dedicated XP build is nice.

Windows XP works on any modern computer 😁

Even bleeding edge newest, you just have to include SATA drivers in the install media. I use XP on my Core2Duo 8600 and 4GB of ram, it only maps 3,25GB but thats ok.

Cyberdyne wrote:

Windows XP works on any modern computer 😁

Even bleeding edge newest, you just have to include SATA drivers in the install media. I use XP on my Core2Duo 8600 and 4GB of ram, it only maps 3,25GB but thats ok.

Yeah, just that not everyone wants to do a dual boot setup, and would rather use hardware closer to the time-frame the games were released in that they plan to play. Just how it is.

The point is exactly that, I suppose.

I owned a pretty similar rig - give or take - back in 2005. It cost be about £900 to build, including the screen which was a 19" Wide LCD @ 1440x900. I built my latest retro rig for a little over £110 (without a screen) plus about 5-6 hours work on the case.

Can it be classed as 'retro' ... I don't know. But it is from a past era, thats for sure. The single core CPU beast era, when GPU's were starting to be able to do some crazy things, and do them really fast.

I have my vanilla Pentium 200 rig. I have my K6-3 rig with V2 SLI. I have my Athlon T-Bird 9x machine. Now I have my ultimate single core XP beast. And I'm done.

As much as I'd LOVE a 486DX2, the prices is too high now, they are so hard to find and to be honest, I just gave up and installed DOSBOX. Shame really, but I have no time.

Here's to NEVER throwing anything away again 😁

Will take pics soon and add them to this thread - along with benchmarks etc... super excited about that.

The single core CPU beast era, when GPU's were starting to be able to do some crazy things, and do them really fast.

I miss that era so much. I mean, yes, I love the new computers and what they can do, but for whatever reasons, I don't see as much of a difference going from say 3.4 GHz to 5GHz as when I'd OC a 1.5GHz to about 2GHz. I know, I know, it's software getting "slower" faster than hardware is getting faster. 🤣

I built a XP rig in the fall of 2006 that has a C2D E6400 with 2 gigs of dual-channel DDR2 667 ram and a 512 mb pci-e X16 7950GT. What a difference a few months made.

I've upgraded it a little so it can handle some of the newer games, but it still runs 32 bit XP Pro. The dual core cpu does adversely affect some older games though. That's why I still have a Win 98 machine!

Yes this is true.

Certain games, including the legendary System Shock 2 (and any game made with the early lithtech engine - such as thief 1 + 2 etc) are broken with newer detonator drivers under windows XP. The mip-maps are all over the place, making them look glitchy. An XP machine and a 98 machine are the best bet to be safe. I also don't like running an older game which was designed for 98 on an XP machine. It's overkill! Hence my T-Bird 98 PC.

😁