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Building an XP gaming computer

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Reply 21 of 49, by clueless1

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I use an 8800GTX on my XP machine. I have had no compatibility issues, though I admit the only "old" game I have on this machine is System Shock 2. The rest of the games are either modern open source games (Battle for Wesnoth, Xonotic) or from GOG.com. There are some on ebay for about $40.

edit: oops! Sorry, I missed the part about AGP. Nevermind...

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Reply 22 of 49, by candle_86

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clueless1 wrote:

I use an 8800GTX on my XP machine. I have had no compatibility issues, though I admit the only "old" game I have on this machine is System Shock 2. The rest of the games are either modern open source games (Battle for Wesnoth, Xonotic) or from GOG.com. There are some on ebay for about $40.

edit: oops! Sorry, I missed the part about AGP. Nevermind...

Well if your on XP why not get a GTX 590 its the fastest XP card before Nvidia stopped testing against XP and lost some comparability with XP, that way you have the fastest possible card with 100% XP support

Reply 23 of 49, by clueless1

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candle_86 wrote:
clueless1 wrote:

I use an 8800GTX on my XP machine. I have had no compatibility issues, though I admit the only "old" game I have on this machine is System Shock 2. The rest of the games are either modern open source games (Battle for Wesnoth, Xonotic) or from GOG.com. There are some on ebay for about $40.

edit: oops! Sorry, I missed the part about AGP. Nevermind...

Well if your on XP why not get a GTX 590 its the fastest XP card before Nvidia stopped testing against XP and lost some comparability with XP, that way you have the fastest possible card with 100% XP support

Thanks for the suggestion. They look quite pricey on ebay and I'm actually very happy with the 8800GTX. 😀 It is not a bottleneck in anything I do.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 24 of 49, by Tertz

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candle_86 wrote:

Well if your on XP why not get a GTX 590 its the fastest XP card before Nvidia stopped testing against XP and lost some comparability with XP

As XP is officially supported even on GTX 960, so some testing in XP goes still. The fastest card with official XP support seems 780 Ti or Titan.
As for compatibility issues on 6xx and later, would be interesting to hear concrete data.

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Reply 25 of 49, by candle_86

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Tertz wrote:
candle_86 wrote:

Well if your on XP why not get a GTX 590 its the fastest XP card before Nvidia stopped testing against XP and lost some comparability with XP

As XP is officially supported even on GTX 960, so some testing in XP goes still. The fastest card with official XP support seems 780 Ti or Titan.
As for compatibility issues on 6xx and later, would be interesting to hear concrete data.

I'll try to dig it up, I remember reading about it back in 2012 when the GTX 680 came out. Preformance in Windows XP was up to 20% worse than in Vista or 7, not sure if that was corrected, but I remember reading that Nvidia didn't build the cards with XP in mind.

Reply 26 of 49, by agent_x007

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780 Ti (OC'ed) vs. Win XP 3DMark scores :
'03 : LINK
'05 : LINK
'06 : LINK
80% of 780 Ti is still better than GTX 590 😀

As for AGP :
I would go 2600 XT GDDR3 or X1950 Pro (but more power in PSU is needed fot it) as max Pentium 4 GPU. 6600/7300 GT ([G]DDR3), are better balance tho.

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Reply 27 of 49, by feipoa

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stuvize wrote:

The SSD would be faster but the i865/875 chipsets have a slight flaw with the SATA controller if any PATA/IDE resources are enabled the SATA controller which should have transfer rate of 150Mbps is reduced to the PATA speed of 133Mbps. Not a big hit on performance but is something to consider.

Do you know if there were any revisions of the i875 which corrected this? I have an Intel S875WP1-E motherboard with HDD connected to SATA and DVD-RW connected to IDE and now I am concerned that my system is not fully optimised.

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Reply 28 of 49, by candle_86

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feipoa wrote:
stuvize wrote:

The SSD would be faster but the i865/875 chipsets have a slight flaw with the SATA controller if any PATA/IDE resources are enabled the SATA controller which should have transfer rate of 150Mbps is reduced to the PATA speed of 133Mbps. Not a big hit on performance but is something to consider.

Do you know if there were any revisions of the i875 which corrected this? I have an Intel S875WP1-E motherboard with HDD connected to SATA and DVD-RW connected to IDE and now I am concerned that my system is not fully optimised.

how old is your SATA HDD, because only in the last year or so have mechanical hard drives been able to saturate SATA first gen anyway

Reply 29 of 49, by feipoa

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I have a mechanical SATA II HDD connected to it. The CPU is a Prescott. Am I loosing out on 17 Mbps? 1 Mbps?

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Reply 30 of 49, by candle_86

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feipoa wrote:

I have a mechanical SATA II HDD connected to it. The CPU is a Prescott. Am I loosing out on 17 Mbps? 1 Mbps?

likely nothing but you can always put that hDD into another system and run an HDD benchmark but I'd be suprised to see it go much over 120mb/s

Reply 31 of 49, by feipoa

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Perhaps it would be easier to run the HDD benchmark with the DVD-RW drive a) connected, b) IDE port disabled in BIOS.

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Reply 32 of 49, by stuvize

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feipoa wrote:

Do you know if there were any revisions of the i875 which corrected this? I have an Intel S875WP1-E motherboard with HDD connected to SATA and DVD-RW connected to IDE and now I am concerned that my system is not fully optimised.

I'm not sure if there was or not, this is not a big deal even when these boards where high end only the highest performing drives like the Raptor X saw any difference. I agree with Candle_86 that the mechanical drive will probably not be bottlenecked SSD may have different results and yes disabling PATA\IDE in BIOS should correct this just have to use external or SATA optical drive. If you have the drives running in RAID is really the best option for i875 or i865 that have RAID if the system seems bottlenecked by the HDD

Reply 33 of 49, by PhilsComputerLab

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Interesting, didn't know about this issue. I do happen to use SATA optical drives whenever I can and diligently disable on-board devices that are not needed.

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Reply 34 of 49, by feipoa

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Currently, I am using only one HDD. Is it possible to setup a RAID mirror on the built-in SATA controller without having to reinstall the OS?

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Reply 35 of 49, by stuvize

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feipoa wrote:

Currently, I am using only one HDD. Is it possible to setup a RAID mirror on the built-in SATA controller without having to reinstall the OS?

I'm not sure I remember reading somewhere in a driver package that it could be done but not %100 if it was for the ICHR5 RAID controller that comes with the i875, I will have to go through my diskettes and driver packages see if I can find it

Reply 36 of 49, by SpaceCowboy87

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I also have an Asus A8N-SLi SE socket 939 mobo with an Athlon 64 3400+ and 4gb of RAM. It's a full atx and can hold 2 PCIe gpu's. Whats the fastest combination of cards I could use in SLI with this setup for the best frame rate on F.E.A.R.?

Reply 37 of 49, by PhilsComputerLab

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SpaceCowboy87 wrote:

I also have an Asus A8N-SLi SE socket 939 mobo with an Athlon 64 3400+ and 4gb of RAM. It's a full atx and can hold 2 PCIe gpu's. Whats the fastest combination of cards I could use in SLI with this setup for the best frame rate on F.E.A.R.?

Seeing it's got PCIe, the sky is the limit.

There is no need for SLI though, F.E.A.R. might have been demanding for period correct cards, but is fairly easy to run with something a little bit more recent. E.g. a 7900 series card should run it well, if you're not happy try a 8800 GTX or GTX 285.

You are better off upgrading the CPU though. I'd recommend an Athlon 64-FX processor for example. The game will benefit from a dual core too.

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Reply 38 of 49, by SpaceCowboy87

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Thanks a lot for the advice. I really like you're XP build videos, they inspired me to put something together. I know the FX is the best upgrade for that socket, they're just hard to find even used. Im even considering building an AMD FM2+ based modern platform with DDR3 to run XP for the best results. There are some modern motherboards from AsRock that still have XP 32 and 64 bit drivers available for download but it also raises another question. Would 64 bit be better due to no RAM limitation like 32 bit? granted I can find the right drivers for everything.

Reply 39 of 49, by PhilsComputerLab

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Oh absolutely.

AM3+, FM2, socket 1156 all run XP. There are really so many options, spoiled for choice 😀

I see no need for 64 bit XP. I usually go with 4 GB of memory. For XP just standard XP SP3 will do the job.

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