Nick_Arrow wrote on 2020-04-27, 15:17:

GPU would I definetly want to upgrade, but which gpu is the best in my case?

The one you can find that runs the games you want to play.

Jorpho wrote on 2020-04-27, 15:50:

Nick_Arrow wrote on 2020-04-27, 15:17:

GPU would I definetly want to upgrade, but which gpu is the best in my case?

The one you can find that runs the games you want to play.

Ok, what gpu card would be the most powerful I can get without going into much issues?

Or should I find another better XP rig?

GTX560 is a nice drop-in for XP machines. I would not use an old network appliance for an XP rig, but it will probably do the job if that's what you really want.

Nick_Arrow wrote on 2020-04-27, 19:56:

Or should I find another better XP rig?

That depends on whether you think it is worth your time and money to achieve some marginal improvement in whatever games you want to play. The computer in question is surely already capable of playing many amusing games.

It is difficult to answer these questions if you don't know what you want to achieve. If you no longer find satisfaction in playing your games, perhaps it is not a matter of simply acquiring additional hardware.

that's a good board to run a pentium 4 and with xp.
865PE northbridge and ich5 southbridge with sata ports.
you've got an agp slot so that will help narrow your choices somewhat.
you are probably going to want to be able to play direct x 9 titles, so that means you'll want an nvidia geforce 6xxx or above an ati radeon 9xxx or above.

The graphics card will be too slow for anything but early XP era games, say up to 2003. Especially if you're gaming at anything above 1280 *1024 resolution. The CPU is hot, loud but plenty fast enough for the early XP era games; the graphics card is the bottleneck. It won't hold up for later XP games (e.g. Oblivion). You're a bit stuck there because if you want to you want a faster graphics card you're stuck with AGP cards on that system. Fast AGP cards are expensive and still "not that fast".

It sounds to me that you're more interested in playing the games than picking up "interesting" or rare hardware. Good news, you can save yourself a ton of cash!

My suggestion would be to go for the next generation socket (Socket 775) up from yours (Socket 478). You can get a basic Core 2 Duo CPU, say an E8200 or E8400, and it will be much faster and quieter than your Pentium 4. Socket 775 allows for both DDR2 or 3, depending on what motherboard and chipset you get (I'd suggest a G41 based board because it is cheap and has the DD3 Support). For the graphics card you can put just about any PCI-E graphics card in there and it'll be much faster than a reasonably priced AGP card.

I'm bored so I picked out a bunch of parts for what I would go for (although you're probably not in the UK!)

£18 motherboard (DDR3) - nothing amazing but quite adequate.
E8400 CPU £3.
2x 1GB DDR3 £5

Now for the graphics card, you could go cheap, low power but not very fast like this Radeon 4670 (for comparison an AGP one is on sale for £109!)

Something cheap, definitely not low power, but fairly fast for xp you could go for something like a Nvidia 275

For something reasonably priced and very fast how about a 560ti

This PC would be plenty fast enough for all XP era games (that is, games that aren't on steam or GOG or whatever that work on Windows 7 / 8 / 10). Of course, you could have a lot of fun playing early XP games with the PC you linked a picture of too.

Yep, If you dont already own the hardware I'd go with everything Almoststew1990 said.

If you do already own it it may be upto playing the games in your list, just try it and then you can make a judgement call before spending money on graphics cards etc.

slightly off topic but a 865 based motherboard with AGP makes for a good Win98/XP duel boot PC if that interests you

Problem of dual boot 98/XP PC is, that you're handicapping yourself with GPU like crazy, once you actually boot into XP. With official drivers, you can go as high as X850 XT PE or 6800 Ultra, and that just isn't cutting it for playing late XP games in high resolutions. There's also problem of AGP limitation, like Almoststew1990 said. You can find some AGP cards with reasonable performance for early XP games, but they are expensive and also unusable for late XP gaming.

So I would say, go for mentioned Socket 775 system for XP only, the whole idea of dual booting 98/XP just isn't worth it for majority of people (and that's coming from someone, who build such a machine), who just want to play some games, especially XP ones.

kolderman wrote on 2020-04-27, 20:00:

GTX560 is a nice drop-in for XP machines. I would not use an old network appliance for an XP rig, but it will probably do the job if that's what you really want.

This is important! What type of computer should I have if I want to play the whole range of Windows XP games from early 2002-2003 until the Windows 7 took over?
I know that a network style computer isn't is the best..So I gues I'm looking for the wrong computer here..

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2020-04-27, 20:31:

The graphics card will be too slow for anything but early XP era games, say up to 2003. Especially if you're gaming at anything […]
Show full quote

The graphics card will be too slow for anything but early XP era games, say up to 2003. Especially if you're gaming at anything above 1280 *1024 resolution. The CPU is hot, loud but plenty fast enough for the early XP era games; the graphics card is the bottleneck. It won't hold up for later XP games (e.g. Oblivion). You're a bit stuck there because if you want to you want a faster graphics card you're stuck with AGP cards on that system. Fast AGP cards are expensive and still "not that fast".

It sounds to me that you're more interested in playing the games than picking up "interesting" or rare hardware. Good news, you can save yourself a ton of cash!

My suggestion would be to go for the next generation socket (Socket 775) up from yours (Socket 478). You can get a basic Core 2 Duo CPU, say an E8200 or E8400, and it will be much faster and quieter than your Pentium 4. Socket 775 allows for both DDR2 or 3, depending on what motherboard and chipset you get (I'd suggest a G41 based board because it is cheap and has the DD3 Support). For the graphics card you can put just about any PCI-E graphics card in there and it'll be much faster than a reasonably priced AGP card.

I'm bored so I picked out a bunch of parts for what I would go for (although you're probably not in the UK!)

£18 motherboard 7592-Socket-LGA775(DDR3) - nothing amazing but quite adequate.
E8400 CPU £3.
2x 1GB DDR3 £5

Now for the graphics card, you could go cheap, low power but not very fast like this Radeon 4670 (for comparison an AGP one is on sale for £109!)

Something cheap, definitely not low power, but fairly fast for xp you could go for something like a Nvidia 275

For something reasonably priced and very fast how about a 560ti

This PC would be plenty fast enough for all XP era games (that is, games that aren't on steam or GOG or whatever that work on Windows 7 / 8 / 10). Of course, you could have a lot of fun playing early XP games with the PC you linked a picture of too.

Thanks for your input! Yes, I'm interested to have a fast and powerful computer for XP games from 2002-until Windows 7 came.
And I want good performance and speed in games. That's all I can explain for the moment. If I have to look for parts it's no problem for me.
Thank you for your list.
Would that 7592-Socket-LGA775 motherboard fits into the PC I linked a photo of?
Would 4 Gb Ram be the best or is the 2 Gb Ram the best for me?
So would the 560ti be the best gpu for me?

Nick_Arrow wrote on 2020-04-28, 12:27:

This is important! What type of computer should I have if I want to play the whole range of Windows XP games from early 2002-2003 until the Windows 7 took over?

Is there something in particular you want to run that won't run under Windows 7 or later for some reason? Because there is no point in selecting hardware that is incompatible with whatever that might be.

Would 4 Gb Ram be the best or is the 2 Gb Ram the best for me?

32-bit Windows generally cannot use 4 GB of RAM.

Jorpho wrote on 2020-04-28, 15:10:

Would 4 Gb Ram be the best or is the 2 Gb Ram the best for me?

32-bit Windows generally cannot use 4 GB of RAM.

Yeah, you cannot get full 4 GB in XP, but you can go higher then 2GB, a little more then 3GB even.

Nvidia GTX960 was the last card supported with drivers for WinXP.

I have had WinXP on an HP z600 with 6-core Xeon and 24gb ram and SSD
I have also had WinXP on an HP z800 with dual Xeon ( 12-cores and 24-threads ) 48gb ram and SSD.
Both had Sound Blaster Audigy 2zs.

They ran good on WinXP. Very stable.

If you don't already own anything this is good period of time to start a XP build Prices are fairly cheap as hardware is in that obsolete rather then retro point in time.

-Socket 775 motherboards are plentiful and will run XP games upto Win7 era fine.
-CPU As always faster is better, raw speed over cores.
-Ram It's true you wont see the full 4GB of ram but it wont hurt performance. so if you get 2 sticks of 2GB for cheap don't worry about it.

-PCI-E graphics card is what you want for XP, that was the main problem with the other system. GTX960 is indeed the last card with official XP support but can go lower if needed.
Most demanding XP game I own is GTA SA not that demanding I know but it runs fine with AA,AF and all that good stuff set to max. what I'm trying to say is a decent 5 year old card will be more then enough for XP.

One of the main reasons for a XP build is EAX which vista and later OS's killed so you do want a decent sound card.
Sound blaster X-Fi based on the EMU20K2 chipset are the last to have WinXP support. (cards based on the CA20K2 wont work)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_X … Fi#X-Fi_line-up

Srandista wrote on 2020-04-28, 10:49:

Problem of dual boot 98/XP PC is, that you're handicapping yourself with GPU like crazy, once you actually boot into XP. With official drivers, you can go as high as X850 XT PE or 6800 Ultra, and that just isn't cutting it for playing late XP games in high resolutions. There's also problem of AGP limitation, like Almoststew1990 said. You can find some AGP cards with reasonable performance for early XP games, but they are expensive and also unusable for late XP gaming.

So I would say, go for mentioned Socket 775 system for XP only, the whole idea of dual booting 98/XP just isn't worth it for majority of people (and that's coming from someone, who build such a machine), who just want to play some games, especially XP ones.

Wile not ideal one could get a sli/cossfire board and use two different GPUs using a hardware profile to disable one card and kvm or dual input monitor to switch between cards.

Yeah, but then again, there's problem with PCIe under 98. Sure, it's solvable, but these are unnecessary hurdles just to get machine compatible with 98. As I said, and I stand by that, dual boot 98/XP just isn't worth for majority of people, if you're aiming primarily on XP games (and I should know, I've done that).